The Power of Belief and The Current State of Social Networking

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Facebook is a failure waiting to happen, MySpace is a wasteland, and AIM is practically an artifact. O yeah! Did I mention Twitter is going the same direction? It is easy to play devils advocate, especially in retrospect. But Facebook is still a hot tamale in many peoples’ books. These internet ventures, and most others for that matter, share a common thread. They unify people for a moment in time with a new, well-structured technology, but they fail to foster a belief with users that supersedes their own corporate agenda - the belief that it is YOUR network.

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Social Networking Cyber-bullies

Some would argue that, in order to more rigorously protect children, social networking sites should be more aggressive in their use of age verification. After all, age verification procedures effectively limit access to adult sites; but then, adults have various forms of government or business-issued identifications, such as driver’s licenses and credit cards. The problem in this case, is that there are no similar forms of identification for minors!

So, at base, there’s no accurate way to verify the age of any young internet user who wants to claim another age in order to visit a social networking site.

Most youth, over about the age of 10, know that it’s possible to lie about their age to register on a site governed by age restrictions. And, social networking sites are highly attractive to students in middle school, many of whom are under the age of 13. Many underage students register on these sites, often with the permission of their parents, but then, there are probably just as many who register without their parents’ permission.

It is important to note, when considering the usefulness of available technologies, that students can often use their school district’s internet service (either on-campus, at school, or off-campus, at public libraries) to access online communities or electronic communication services where they can engage in cyberbullying. So, it’s probably a mistake to think that a filtering technology will, or even can, prevent cyber-bullying or trash-texting from happening.

A school district’s filtering software can be set to block access to popular online communities, but a moderately intelligent middle school student can easily set up a home computer system that will provide the capability to circumvent the school computer to get to these sites or simply access a proxy site that will facilitate bypass of a filtering system…

Don’t believe me? Prove it to yourself. Conduct a Google search for yourself on the words bypass Internet filter to see how easy it is for students to find instructions on how to defeat any blocks established by a school district using filtering technology.

And, as if that weren’t already enough to be concerned about, it’s important to remember that students can also engage in cyberbullying by using cell phones or PDAs while at school. Anyone can easily access their online social networking profile using their cell phone.

Now, it appears that most school districts have policies prohibiting students from using cell phones during class, but in many schools, there are active programs teaching students to use personal digital assistants (PDAs) for educational purposes (mathematics, chemistry, descriptive statistics, etc). And, all the while, the prices of these devices are dropping rapidly.

The major emerging concern is how parents and schools will manage student use of technology, when many students have wireless personal digital devices that they use in the classroom for legitimate educational activities — but, that function outside of the school’s filtering environment and can also be used to engage in online social aggression.

In the UK, there has been a growing, and nasty, trend over the last year for teenagers (mainly) to film unprovoked attacks on innocent victims using their cellphones. The resulting video footage or images are then distributed to friends in an almost cult like fashion. This has become known as the happy slapping craze.

I see that the Washington Post is today running a story about online ‘Fight Club’ postings. While these, it would appear, are organized street fights between consenting adults, the worry must surely be that happy slapping will eventually crossover to the online fight club scene…

Tags: cell phone number reverse look up, criminal background check, cell trace, social networking, cell phone

CyberBullies and Social Networking: A Slippery Slope

As indicated in our introductory piece, this will be the first of a three part series on the cyber-bullies, trash-texting and happy slapping. While every generation seems to find its own way of “doing its own thing,” the recent popularity of social networking, absent responsible background checks, seems to have placed countless children and younger teens in the way of harm that none of them could either anticipate or control.

I hope, by identifying some of the concerned parties and laying out some of the basic considerations involved, that this series will generate more interest in conducting reputable criminal background checks, as these should sharpen parental awareness and place teens ahead of the curve so they can act more responsibly.

That said, we’ll begin our discussion in the usual way, by defining a few key terms.
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College Life Before Facebook, Part 1

I’d like to pass on some things that have crossed my mind since I’ve gotten into Facebook. The more I thought about it, the more I wrote, so I’ve decided to break this up into two different posts. This is the first one, and it basically lays out a framework for the points I want to make later on.

Like most people, I’ve been adding new friends/ people from the past, people from college and high school. I’ve been looking at their faces, their profiles, and wondering what I would say to them after so many years have passed.

The main thing is that by engaging my memories about them, and what they meant to me — it all just reminds me of how much I’ve grown since then. I mean, we’re talking 30 years since high school and 25 years since college.

I got friends out there who are now grandparents, and interestingly — most of them, when I look at their profiles, have anywhere from a few to maybe a dozen so-called “friends.” Then, of course, there are the youngsters that I know also, nephews and nieces, people like that (they’re “20 something”), and I’ve noticed that a lot of them have anywhere from 200 to 300 friends!! Of course, they’re in college and they’re attacking it like any other fad.

For them, it’s cool to have a Facebook presence and to join hundreds of arcane Facebook “groups,” so their numbers will naturally soar as a result of their being involved with one another, in college, and let’s face it, Facebook’s only been around since 2004.

In other words, we didn’t have social networking sites like Facebook when I was coming up.

” . . . when I left the all-black east-side of Cleveland to attend an all-white prep school (St. John’s Prep. in Collegeville, MN) in 1969, Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been killed the previous summer, and race relations were tense, to say the least.” - Steve Maclin

When I graduated from Carleton College (Northfield, MN) in ‘76, our school had just snapped up its first computer. It was not exactly the “talk of the campus” (it was more of an “interesting oddity” at that time); it filled up a whole room that was always refrigerated, and no one that I knew had ever actually “seen it.” Still, it was apparently memorable.

Guess that goes to show just how much things have changed in a relatively short amount time.

What’s worth teasing out, is the idea that I grew up knowing that the “school trip” (i.e., the whole “going away to boarding school/ college experience”) involved getting to know someone for a couple or few years, and eventually, splitting up and going your separate ways — knowing that you’d probably never see each other again for the rest of your lives! Heck, I finished college, grad school, my doctorate and taught for 10 years and, for the most part, things were still like that! We didn’t make associations that were “that close” because we knew, in the back of our minds, that pretty soon, we’d have to split up. There were no “best friends forever” (BFF); in fact, nothing was “forever.”

I mean, that’s the way things were, we all knew it, and though we didn’t exactly like it, we accepted it and worked around it — by putting more into the time we had together.

Nowadays, virtually all kids have cell phones, most either own or have access to computers, and they’re now able to make and stay in relationships, using Facebook and other social networking sites, which collectively will mean they won’t have to say goodbye to one another. Their list of friends can simply grow larger and larger and, for a lot of them, they’ll probably stay in touch… Not all, but let’s just say a lot of them will.

So, I ask myself: what are they going to be like when they get to be grandparents??

What’s His Facebook?

Michael Jordan was a phenomenal basketball player in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Many consider him the greatest of all time, and he’s probably best remembered for winning championships and literally “hanging in mid air.”

However, I remember Jordan for something else . . . his head fakes. Never before had one player made entire teams look so foolish. A mere turn or bob of his head would send his opponents tripping over their own feet.
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