SOCIAL NETWORKING

What are some ways (corporate and otherwise) that these technologies can be used?
Having social networking in a corporation increases a trust environment between employees and management. Employees can stay connected to the company and each other. A social networking also Encourage collaboration thanks to continuous communication within the employees. Employees can work in an environment where their opinion is counted and that becomes as an incentive for them as well. In general, through social networking people can keep in touch with coworkers, friends, old friends and family. Besides establishing important social relations, social networking members can share their interest with others by joining groups and forums. Some networking can help members to finds jobs and or establish business contacts. Most social networking offer additional features, such as, member can create profiles pages where they can describe their personality. The most popular features are music, videos. Members can also get educate by looking profiles of famous people such writers, artist, singers among others. They can also bring out different opinions and debate with other members.
What are the benefits of these technologies to society?
The benefits of social networking are that people keep in touch, can speak up, and have communication through these technologies, especially when most people are busy going to school, work and taking care of their families. Thus, if it was not for these technologies having a social environment would be even more difficult. People can also share thoughts and views of different subjects and feel more close to family, friends and even coworkers.
Is there a "dark side"?
Yes, there is a dark side, even though; I see more positives than negatives. I think that a lot of people rely on these social networking to communicate negative things to other people, especially between teenagers. They can express some of their feeling without thinking that those comments can be hurtful to others. Other negative sides to these technologies is that people tend to lose interpersonal communication because of the amount of time communicating through a computer they lose face to face social contact skills. Before I finish, there is another dark sides of these social networking that I haven’t mentioned but it is very important, and that is, that some people use false identities, therefore, they take advantage of this to commit crimes specially towards innocents people in most cases teenagers, which also are using false identities to participate in these new technologies because of their ages.
My opinion of the way these technologies might evolve in the future
I cannot say much about how these technologies are going to evolve in the future because technology changes all the time. I think that all these technologies have a priority to keep people communicating. Thus, these companies such as facebook, my space, twitter, etc are going to personalize more features and settings that are in their social networks to make them special and unique. They are going to focus on security and privacy of their users. They might give the opportunity to people to choose what they want to put on their pages, even though, people have that now; we still have lots of things that these companies have imposed on us, such as advertisings, ads among others.
by Stephen J. Dubner. “Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum. Feb 15, 2008 <http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/is-myspace-good-for-society-a-freakonomics-quorum/?emc=eta1>