Social Networking

I have a Facebook and a Myspace account. I guess that means that I am a bad man, right? Well, I am not trying to hook up with girls half my age or younger, and I am not trying to do something completely stupid on the world wide web! My goal is to meet up with people who have the same interests as I do, and to also share and exchange information on different world events. That is why I believe in social networking. It allows you to have this kind of human interaction with others that you might not get if you did not have a computer. With that said, I do not abuse my ability to have these online profiles. In the news of the last few years, I and the rest of the American people have seen many things about the negative effects of social networking online. In my opinion, these negative things happen only because of the people who do not know how to use these websites correctly. Back home in Duval I have seen some stories on local people who have had bad experiences that started on Myspace, but they should have known better to not hook up with people online. When I here about how relationships start online, I cringe and I make my mind up about the person who is doing that. Personally I do not think it is stupid to try and find love online. Trying to get a booty call online is another thing. Recently I saw a couple of episodes of Dr. Phil, and there was a girl who had been trying to hook up with a man in Palestine since she was 16. She made two attempts to see the man. The first one failed because she could not leave the country at the airport she was to depart from due to her mother reporting her to the FBI. Then once she turned 18 she made another attempt to go to Palestine, and she was successful and met up with this man from the Middle East whom she thought she was in love with. In the end he turned out to be an abusive man. My question is: HOW IN THE HELL DID HER MOTHER NOT KNOW THAT SHE WAS CHATTING WITH THIS MAN ONLINE? That really bothered me to see her nearly cry her eyes out on the Dr. Phil Show about her daughter trying to hook up with this Middle Eastern man. Then she had the nerve to talk about the possibility of her daughter being killed or never seeing her again. Maybe this would have been avoided if the woman would monitor her daughter's online habits! Check this link out for more information about that story: http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/michigan/index.ssf?/base/news-48/1196210049210800.xml&storylist=newsmichigan
This is where my issue of social networking comes up. If people are so concerned about the things that their children are exposed to on websites such as facebook and myspace, then they need to monitor what the children are doing online. It really aggravates me and pisses me off to hear people like that make an attempt to criticize these websites and outlaw them for the rest of the people because of what they have experienced. This same argument can be used for the whole Internet when it comes to child pornography being broad casted on different websites. But just because there are perverts who like to sexually violate children, that does not mean that the Internet itself is bad. That is why there are many options to protect children from pornography when they are online from pop-up blockers to parental controls for a home computer. But even then a child can sneak over to a friends house whose parents do not regulate computers in their house, and they can view certain things over there. Maybe Facebook and Myspace could use a system for parents to monitor the online behavior of their children to stop the problems that exist in their lives because of these websites. I do not care! As an adult, if I want to meet people and get acquainted with people who think as I do then that is my business! Now this does not mean that I will just put any kind of information and pictures of various activities on any of my social networking profiles. I have heard the stories of people who have been fired because of certain pictures on social networking profiles that show them doing things that they more than likely had no business doing. That really bothers me because there are countless individuals that I know who put their party pictures on their Facebook profiles. They obviously do not consider the things that they do before they do them. I know that if I was fired from a job because of pictures from wild college nights I would be highly upset!. Still every individual must be careful of what they do on a website for social networking. If you try to hook up with people for the wrong reasons on these websites, it might be your last time looking at a computer screen!