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”

Well, it’s the start of the new year and I can’t think of a better way to dive back in here than to tackle that heated, controversial topic . . . breastfeeding. It seems every couple of months, we hear of a news item about a nursing mom who was asked to leave a store, shopping mall or restaurant because she had the nerve (insert sarcastic tone here) to breastfeed her child in public. Oh, the horror! Of course, this being the 21st century, we now don’t have to settle for such infantile behaviour occurring in the real world; now we see it being brought onto the internet, thanks to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook deeming pictures of nursing mothers as “pornographic” and “obscene”. Excuse me a minute while I pick my jaw up from the floor.

Well, thankfully, breastfeeding moms are not taking this lying down. Kelli Roman is one of several women who have had pictures they posted of themselves breastfeeding their child removed from their Facebook page and being given the cursory explanation that the site doesn’t allow images that are “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit” in nature. Roman’s response to this censorship was to start a new Facebook group called “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!“, a group that today has a membership of over 97 000 Facebook users.

Now, I’ve read how some of these pictures were removed by Facebook and MySpace on account of other members citing them as violating the site’s Terms of Service in regards to the posting of inappropriate images. So after some digging around the Net, I was able to find an example of one of these pictures that ended up being banned by Facebook just this past week on December 28, 2008 because it was deemed “pornographic” and/or “offensive”. Click here to continue reading »”Yet Another Breastfeeding Controversy – Here We Go Again”