Social networks keep growing and growing
The role of the Internet in today’s society keeps expanding. The recent phenomenon of social networks is another demonstration of the effect of the Internet on the lives of hundreds of millions of people all over the globe. This explosion of connectedness will provide material for sociology students for years to come.
Sometimes you can be too connected. For example, Twitter has been in the news due to security breaches by a congressman and a juror causing a mistrial. On the potential mistrial, Ars Technica comments:
Twitter is great, but our insatiable appetite for immediacy may be clouding our sense of propriety sometimes. One has only to sit through a corporate meeting in which half the people in the room are replying to texts and e-mails on their cell phones to see just how little face-to-face interaction is respected in some settings. And even when the setting is appropriate, the content (as in Powell’s case) might be better saved for an e-mail to a group of friends, not a post to the world.
Discretion may be the better part of valor, but it’s also a necessary virtue for anyone who wants to practice “safe tweeting.”
Another social network, Facebook, has reached such a position of importance that it is the subject of the lead story in the Sunday New York Times business section. The article begins:
When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.
That staggering growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.
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