Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I express my deep gratitude to Ms.Irene S.F. Canon of Culiat HighSchool for her constant
support, guidance and motivation which helped me immensely in completing this project. The
project provided with an opportunity to understand the fundamentals of research methods in a
better manner and apply them. The insistence on taking up a socially relevant topic like the use of
social networking sites help us to understand the psychology of the people using these sites
better and correlate the research to human behavioural aspect.I also would like to thank our
respondents for giving me their valuable time and providing me with the information needed to
carry out the research successfully.
INTRODUCTION
Wikipedia states that a social network is “…a social structure made of nodes (which are
generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations…”
(Social network, 2007). With the rapid growth of people who use or have access to the Internet,
social networking websites are a must for the Internet community to stay in touch with each other.
Social networking web sites help people keep in touch with old friends, make new friends,
distribute new data or product, and many more aspects of our everyday lives. The first official
social networking web site was Classmates.com which was founded in 1995 (Social Network,
2007). What followed was a slow but steady growth in numbers of social networking websites to
the overwhelming number of sites we have today. The reason that social networking websites
work so well is that, like their inception, they start of small and then grow exponentially. The site
starts off with a few people who then tell their friends about the site, then those friends tell their
friends about the site and soon the site is a huge database of users connected by friends,
acquaintances, or just random people. The web sites are made to “…allow users to create a
"profile" describing themselves and to exchange public or private messages and list other users
or groups they are connected to in some way.” (Social Network 2007). Most social networking
websites are often designed to fit a certain type of community such as the college community
being mirrored by Facebook.com or a music/party community mirrored by MySpace.com. With
the rapid growth of social networking web sites and their global scale usage, whatever one feels
concerning social networking web sites is irrelevant because social networking web sites are on a
popularity rise and are here to stay.
ISSUES OF CONCERN
Although many people don’t think of it, social networking web sites harbour many
dangerous elements and many people are concerned about some major problems
that they contain. One such problem is privacy issues. With social networking web
sites like Orkut.com, Facebook.com and MySpace.com, it is almost too easy to
retrieve personal information about someone and use it to harm them. In a case
with MySpace.com, the availability of being able to customize one’s own site has
allowed people to use phishing html code to create phishing profiles that allows
that person to access anyone’s profile who have visited the phishing profile.
Phishing can often lead to the loss of personal information such as usernames,
credit card numbers, and passwords. (Phishing 2007) This in turn causes great
privacy issues since that person can now access personal information and then
sell it off to marketing companies for a profit. (MySpace, 2007) This selling of
information to companies has led to the rise in spam emails that we all receive.
Another great issue of concern with social networking web sites is that of
child safety. Research has shown that almost three out of every four teenagers
who use social networking web sites are at risk due to their lack of using online
safety. (Joly, Karine, 2007) A lot of the web sites do have an age requirement but it
is easily bypassed by the lying about of one’s age. Even if they don’t lie about their
age the average age requirement is around fifteen years old. Myspace.com has
been specifically targeted for these child safety issues after a sixteen year old girl
flew to Tel Aviv, Israel to meet and engage in sexual relations with a twenty year
old male whom she had met through MySpace.com. (MySpace, 2007) Although a
lot of the social networking web sites are trying to implement new ways to keep
children safe, MySpace.com included, predators are finding ways around these
new implementations and kids are still naive to the fact that not everyone online is
who they say they are.
A third issue of concern with social networking web sites is that of copyright
infringement. With the massive amount of files shared through social networking
web sites it has to tell sometimes who the original owner of the selected file is.
Also, commercial products are being reproduced by individuals and uploaded to
these social networking web sites. YouTube.com is a great example of how copy
right infringement can come about using a social networking website. Members
can pretty much upload anything they want on to YouTube.com to be viewed by
anyone who comes across it. This leads to many people committing copyright
infringement and uploading files and video clips that don’t belong to them. The only
real way that copyright infringement is reported is through the self-policing of the
YouTube community. (YouTube, 2007) With the easily missed copy right
infringement YouTube has been sued many times in the past and is now being
sued for over one billion dollars by Viacom on the claim that YouTube.com has
160,000 videos that belong to Viacom on their site without Viacom’s permission.
(YouTube, 2007)
OBJECTIVE
In this age of globalization, the world has become too small a place thanks to the
electronic media and portals. Communication has become effective as never
before thanks to the advent of internet. The social networking sites have also
played a crucial role in bridging boundaries and crossing the seas and bringing all
people at a common platform where they can meet like minded people or find old
friends and communicate with them. It has become a potential mean to relation
building and staying in touch with all known.
Hence the objective that we wanted to achieve through our research is to:
Find out the influence of social networking sites on the personal and professional
life of the people- how it affects their relations, what are its uses for each
individuals and how have they been influenced by these sites.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The social networking sites are gaining a lot of popularity these days with almost
all of the educated youth using one or the other such site. These have played a
crucial role in bridging boundaries and crossing the seas and enabling them to
communicate on a common platform. It has become a popular and a potential
mean for them to stay friends with the existing ones and to grow up their social
circle at least in terms of acquaintances.
The question regarding the safety, privacy and the legal issues have been cropping
up all this time. Through this research we try to find out the impact of these
networking sites on the personal and professional lives of people using them. It is
a very subjective question to answer and is very opinion based and the same is
reflected in the research methodology adopted by us.
The report is initiated with the definition of the objective followed with the research
methodology used along with the research design, sample size, methods used for
the purpose of conducting survey. It also incorporates the sampling frame and the
data collection procedure.
Subsequent to this is the Introduction to the networking sites along with a brief
description of the most popular sites. Then the issues of concern which have come
up along the way in all these years since these sites gained popularity are
discussed. The various issues and concerns of the respondents are also
incorporated there. The next part of the research has the literature surveys which
are the articles we took up from the published reports. We then analyzed and
interpreted the data at length. The last part deals with the suggestions and
recommendations that the group has come up with after carefully analyzing and
incorporating the opinion of all concerned.
SUGGESTIONS
Some ideas for future research for social networking websites would be personal
contact offices to register on these sites to determine the legitimacy of the person
who is trying to register. Although this would most likely end up a great hassle, it
would provide the best security out there for people who are trying to have safe fun
and connect with people that share similar interests and ideas.
Another future tool social networking websites could use would be a licensing
agreement with certain parties to prevent copyright infringement from happening
BIBLIOGRAPHY