Response - Growing Up Online

1) Before Myspace and Facebook, "social networking" was a much less sophisticated concept. Online chatrooms, instant messaging, and dating sites have been around longer. However, they didn't have all the games and applications. They didn't resemble a personal web page like myspace does. Social networks themselves, visualized as webs or groups where all members are interconnected, were obviously much smaller until the advent of Myspace and being able to accumulate "friends."

2) How do you explain Facebook to...

Friends - It's a website that you join where you make a profile of yourself with pictures and stuff and you find your friends on there and talk to them.

Parents - It's a website that you sign up on to get an account and you can put pictures on it and send emails and do games and quizzes and keep in touch with friends.

Grandparents - Ok, so you go on the Internet to this website called Facebook. You join it almost like a club. You can type in information about yourself and put pictures of yourself up for people to see. You can search for other people you know that have joined the website and you can send them emails.

A teenager living in 1950 - Why bother? They wouldn't believe me. "There's this machine that's kind of like a television and a library and a calculator and it can show you anything you want. It's called a computer. You just have to type in what you want to see. These places you see are called websites. There's one website called Facebook. It's like a club because you can sign up for it and so can all your friends that have computers.

3) Visiting a stranger's Myspace page...
This page has a lot of personality quiz results on it, telling me that this person would rather indirectly show people who he is instead of writing it or demonstrating it himself. He views himself through others' eyes. His background is a repeating photograph of a city on a canal at twilight. It doesn't appear to have much symbolism, but rather it seems to show that he likes landscapes. The colors of the boxes are plain gray. They aren't very exciting, and there's too much boring text from quiz results to really interest me. The display name and his friends deter me because he seems like one of those nerdy introverts who is trying to be cool. To me this page is not an expression of his own self. The pictures also offer little. There aren't many of them, but there is one album devoted to pictures of flowers and trees, and they demonstrate no skill on the photographer's part. The pictures of the profile owner do not show him to be a very engaging person. I would not be tempted to get to know this person.

4) Facebook compartmentalizes everything. You have to click on some button or link to get to most information that you might want to view about a person. You can't create your own layout for your page because Facebook dictates where everything goes. While it's more compartmentalized, it's very unorganized.

5) On Facebook you have fewer oppurtunities to convey your message because everything is so compartmentalized. Using this site as a medium isn't very effective at putting your message out front.

6) I thought the documentary presented all facets of the issue quite well. Obviously, the Internet is great for keeping and touch with friends and for education. But, as other technology such as television, it can be used in excess and for the wrong purposes. The fears it shows are very real, and not everyone understands the consquences of being careless on the Internet. It showed me that I actually tend to agree more with the parents.