Within the Heart of the Media

Facebook & Msn Stand Hand-in-Hand in Participatory Culture

Today, people of all ages are getting involved in gaming, gorilla art, amateur videos and of course online communities such as dating communities and social networking communities. Social networking and online communities such as Facebook, MySpace and MSN seem to be the popular forms of communication these days for people of all ages. These websites are places where someone can communicate with people half way across the world and they can catch up with old friends or family members, but they really are places where we as social beings are broadcasting ourselves all over the internet. The minute you add your name to a website like Facebook, msn, hotmail, YouTube, etc is the minute you are welcoming yourself into the world of cyberspace. Personally I believe that MSN chat and Facebook go hand in hand because they are places where people can interact, they are done over the internet and they can both be very dangerous if not monitored properly. Sometimes I hate to say it but I am a pretty big part of both MSN and Facebook communities, I have family in England that I am able to keep in touch with regularly as well as friends in different schools in different parts of Canada and the U.S that I unfortunately do not get to see all the time. When used safely and appropriately, these online communities can become very reliable to whoever is using it, although when used inappropriately with a sense of carelessness these places can become Extremely dangerous!
PC’s N Dreams is a website that allows web surfers to read recent articles on different categories concerning the internet, such as Chat Nightmares, Porn Nightmares, Virus Nightmares, excreta. When reading the articles I noticed one thing, that they were all very similar situations: young girls being lured away by older men over MSN or other chat rooms to be used for sexual purposes. For example one of the cases was a 28 year old Montreal man who gained access to his victims by getting a hold of their contact lists through the internet. He would first pose as a friend and then would blackmail the girls for sexual purposes and after this incident he will be facing a total of 111 charges containing threatening, extorting and corrupting the morals of these young girls. The one thing that Facebook has that MSN doesn’t is security, with Facebook you can always check if you know the person before you add them, while MSN you cannot do that, the person doesn’t have their first and last name in their email address and so msn users usually just accept them without knowing or even caring who they are. This is where it can get very dangerous and where it is time for the parents to step in and take control over the uses of these websites for their children. If there is one thing that I have learned in this Mass Communications class and the Internet Survey and Research class is that the internet is ridiculously scary, it is a very big place where information is constantly being thrown around. Many people do not realize this and need to take the time to learn about the dangers of the internet so they are able to teach it to their children, (who are the generation growing up in the world of technology) precautions they need to take when using the internet.

Works Cited

‘Internet Predator Chat Nightmares’ PC’s N Dreams

posted by Brittany Pacitti's Mass Communications @ 6:33 AM