Social networking is considered as a new opportunity to create and communicate with people who care about a specific issue. It provides great benefits to not only a group of individuals, but also people within the companies, such as a unique community, thoughts sharing activities improvement, good news celebration, and so on. However, the “dark side” of the social networking is the privacy issues, misleading information, and too much power to the consumer.
“What’s next? Your future in social networking”, a special interactive report written by Maclean stated that social networks are not only Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube; but also new ways to communication and doing business. The report also indicates that the social networking can reduce business cost.
In the corporate level, the social network may be used to find jobs; Frank Langfitt wrote a story about Osram Sylvania found its talented employee Alfred LaSpina through Linkedin in his article “Social Networking Technology Boots Job Recruiting”. Linkedin is a site that allows people to put information in their profile, so that recruiters can see and hire workers easily.
On the other hand, the loss of privacy is an important issue. People may input their private information like their real name, date of birth, and address on the site, while other people may steal this kind of information to commit frauds. Consequentially, many consumers start losing confidence on the social media.
In sum, the social networking has its good and bad factors to the consumer. It is a powerful tool that can help people to success, and also may lead to failure. People must be very careful when working on the network.
i think once you have your personal information on the web, it is not private anymore. Somewhere somebody is tracking you or monitoring you whether for the good or bad purpose. What I meant is, its just not yours anymore. Although Facebook and Twitter has all the privacy options but it also comes with complication. Your information are OUT THERE. You will be surprised once you search your own name on a search engine. But this is miniscule, I am kind of looking at the big picture. I might be thinking a bit much but we should all use this new media for the good.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you that, anyone can be mislead by this social networking tools. It could be propaganda tool for rouge regime as well. I guess it has both good and bad sides. I hope we all use it for good.