An online conversation with a friend of mine this week had me thinking about social networking sites and the relationships they foster.  I was told about a mutual friend who was experiencing some hard knocks in his personal life.  While he shared news of his troubled state with the thousands of people who are connected to him on one of these social networking sites, less than a handful of them took the time to respond to him with words of encouragement or support.  Although this casts an unflattering light on social networking sites, I can’t help but feel that it reveals certain truths about social media in general.

By its nature, social media sites are designed to revolve around us.  We share the ideas, stories and information that we want to share.  We make connections with people on these networks who we have an interest in connecting with.  Where the differences arise is whether Click here to continue reading »”Is Social Media Making Us Uncaring?”

In my previous entry, I wrote about the ongoing tactic used by social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to remove pictures of mothers breastfeeding their children as they deemed them to be “offensive” and/or “pornographic” in nature. Indeed, the blogosphere has been ablaze with posts either expressing outrage at this continued discrimination against women or worse, people trying to rationalize that images of breastfeeding mothers would be as appropriate as seeing pictures of people going to the bathroom as both are ‘natural acts’ (how’s that for a mature, rational thought process – trying to connect providing sustenance to a baby with the process of excretion). Now I’ve already made my position on this clear in my last post, but as I inferred near the end of that entry, there is another related issue arising from this that bears some examination for further discussion and debate. So what I want to discuss here is the framework under which this controversy is occurring and that is how should we define the balance between how end users of a social-networking site communicate and share and the rights/responsibilities of the owners/managers of these online community websites. Click here to continue reading »”Social-Networking Sites MySpace and Facebook – It’s Time For Some Change”