In “Social Media and Young Adults”, the Pew Internet and American Life Project conducted studies examining the impact of the Internet on 21st century culture including families, education, and civic life. It explains that blogging as a whole has remained steady, but now younger adults aren’t blogging as much as older adults are. Next it goes into the statistics of social networking sites, where it claims Facebook as the most used one, followed by Myspace and LinkedIn. Young adults lead the way in social networking sites with an average rate of 72% of the population, along with the use of Twitter, which is one-third of the 18-29 year old population. It explains how the laptop has now exceedingly replaced the desktop, and shows that 81% of young adults are wireless internet users. A quarter of all adults go online. Cell phone usage has extremely high ratings, claiming that 93% of adults ages 18-29 now have a cell phone, along with a shocking statistic that 58% of all 12 year olds now own a cell phone. Lastly, the statistics show the highest percentage of people using the internet for current events and politics, followed by online shopping, and last but not least followed by health, dieting, and fitness information, which shows the diminishing amount of exercise America probably have since the internet and technology in the 21st century has brought about.
In “Social Network Site Taste Test: Myspace or Facebook?” gives examples of people’s opinions regarding the setup of both social networking sites, along with which groups prefer which, and an overall focus on the fact that social networking sites allow people to express their individuality. The younger kids define Myspace as “cool”, while the older set of kids claim Facebook is the most popular used social networking site. Myspace allows the use of profile personalization, where they can add colors, interesting texts, song choices that relate to their profiles, creative pictures, and overall account for a vast amount of self-expression. Where Facebook users claim that Facebook is simple, neat, and clean, just the way they like it. It seems like Myspace users don’t like Facebook’s “Neatness”, and Facebook users, don’t agree with Myspace’s “Clutter-filled customization”. It related to the individual’s style, values, and preferences. Someone who uses Myspace has the ability to “bling” out their whole profile, using foul-language songs and has paraphernalia all over their page. Whereas Facebook users can go for the clean-cut, typed, neat and organized, business looks of their choice. The choice of some of these cultural signals may not be as appealing to others , but often these sites rely mainly on the individuals social setting, race, and class, and this is the main reason why people choose the preference of Myspace or Facebook.
This essay, “I’m so Totally, Digitally Close to You”, is talking mainly about the influence of Facebook and Twitter on people, and how these two social networking dominate the entire thinking of them. What makes Facebook and Twitter very special to people, either youths or adults, is their ability to keep them updated with all what is going on with their friends. Sometimes, some of our Facebook friends keep updating their status about every single detail and action they do during the day, such as “eating”, “studying”, and “nothing to do!”, and I think that this is the summit of absurdity. What I really like about the new Facebook is the privacy options that were added recently, so every user can limit the access of his\her friends to his\her personal profile. It talks about how Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, recording every single move, which I’m not sure I agree with, because Facebook is just a way to publish what we want to publish, and it does not record our actions automatically, but us who control our own recordings. At the beginning, people used to underestimate the value of Facebook and Twitter, and they used to think that it is not their business if someone starts a new relationship or break up with his\her partner; for instance. But after a while, people found themselves access their accounts unconsciously to check up their friends’ news and see what is going on with the others. I think that the importance of Facebook and Twitter lies in making people able to contact their old friends and be acquainted with new friends; in additions, some of them could find good job opportunities through Facebook. On the other hand, the disadvantages of Facebook and Twitter are their huge role in consuming and wasting the time of many students. Furthermore, the fact that all what we post on Facebook and all our uploaded pictures are saved in the Facebook server is somehow disturbing and worrying, even if we delete them from our accounts. This reading bring a sense of accuracy and likeableness to me because of the way it is written, and the real facts that are reported in it according to how people use Facebook and Twitter, along with how using these two social networking affect peoples’ social life, and where technology can someday lead us.
In, “Myspace Outage Leaves Millions Friendless”, Discusses how Myspace had a system failure leaving 150 million people unable to log on to their profiles or website. It shut down on a Friday where some people took the loss of connection as extreme, and some took it as a solution that will simply work itself out, but most of the people suffering from the loss of Myspace, have taken it personally. People are claiming that they feel alone because they aren’t in contact with their thousand friends, some are devastated that they will have to spend a large amount of time getting all their friends back, some spend so much time on Myspace that they don’t know how to entertain themselves otherwise, and some feel as if they lost their whole sense of self simply because their profiles aren’t visible. People began freaking out knowing that they can’t message their friends, send links and pictures, or simply check the news feed, as if they relied on Myspace to control what happens in their daily lives. Even a smaller knock off Myspace site was invented during the outage so that constant users wouldn’t feel so lost without the ability to use Myspace. This really shows how crazy people are about social networking and how that craze can become somewhat dangerous to humans and society around the world.