Social Networking technologies can be used in a vast number of ways. It can be used for personal reasons such as voicing your opinion, or posting your own personal content. It can also be utilized by corporations and different businesses to gauge consumer opinion and feedback. Many businesses also use social networking as a way to be able to answer questions from consumers and in some instances act as customer support. Society is already seeing benefits from social networking by allowing people of all kinds; family, friends, and associates to be able to connect and share things with each other. It can also benefit society allowing grass roots movements, and group opinions to have a voice, such as the Black Lives Matter movement.
There is definitely a "dark side" to social networking such as cyber bullying and privacy concerns. According to research from Alessandro Acquisti "people are more likely to divulge key personal information — their photo, birthday, hometown, address and phone number — on social networking sites than they would on other web sites." (Wharton, 2009) This lets stalkers and identity thieves to have much easier access to your confidential information without you even considering what your putting up. People are aware of these risks, they are willing to put their information out there but also takes steps into creating some sort of barrier between the public and those who they don't mind have access to their information through privacy settings. According to researchers, Danah Boyd and Eszter Hargittai, "most Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009 and that “engagement with privacy settings increased significantly” between 2009 and 2010." (Parry, 2010) These technologies might evolve in the future by bringing more capabilities through social networking such as the ability to vote.
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