~ In college many students are in long-distance relationships. I chose this article because I felt that a lot of people who read this blog would be able to relate. Facebook has ruined many relationship but it has also helped keep many strong. Facebook helps keep people updated in others lives and it reminds us of certain events going on in other people's lives. Facebook is very beneficial at keeping people involved in one another lives.
Relationships 2.0: Social media – taking the distance out of long distance relationships
Social media has drastically changed the
way we go about our daily business – this has been firmly established by
now. Media scholars are exploiting (in a good way) all the
possibilities and data the exciting platforms provide for research to
bring us a clearer picture of our society and the world. But somewhere
in that system are also real people with real lives and relationships,
which are also being integrated into this new social space. The thought
of real life being stirred into social media, which in essence is virtual, sounds a bit paradoxic. However, this is what we do now – have and maintain relationships through social media.
Facebook, one of the most popular social networking platforms, which
has also been measured, analysed and dissected by various researchers,
has brought together hundreds of old friends, I would venture to guess.
Reconnecting with the old, connecting very swiftly with the new,
maintaining the current friends, acquaintances, colleagues etc. – sounds
like a promising feature. There are researchers who believe that
interaction through social media has a negative effect on our lives in
the long run. Andrew Keen is one of the key criticisers of the web 2.0 in general, whereas Nicholas Carr takes a more worried stance on the effect of the Internet on us, but Elias Aboujaoude,
MD has written a lengthy book on the dangers of being online, in which
he touches upon the topic of relationships a lot, from an internet
dating point of view. The risks and criticisms, even though often
discussed in the extremes, are definitely valid, but the same social
media can also act in a positive way in our real human
relationships. However, the critical thoughts on social media provide a
good starting point for critically scrutinising the long distance 2.0.
So let’s put the society – the people – back into social media.
After years of being an international student and making friends all
over the world, social media tools are the easiest and cheapest way for
someone like myself to keep in touch with them. The world turns into
this small global village, because I can chat to my friends on the other
side of the world in real time and without the social media tools that
would not be possible in any other way than phoning. This goes also
applies for professional communication in our multi-national
corporations and personal/romantic connections. The world is
cosmopolitan and our relationships of all sorts are becoming
increasingly more global. Soshable, a social media blog, also argues that social media helps to “keep our long-distance relationships hot”.
What interests me in our relationships mediated by social media, is
the result, the end product and meaning of these communications.
Facebook provides a vast amount of data, of which the ‘relationship
status’ and ‘current location’ are just a few examples. This could be
used for retrieving a large sample of people for studying the
‘long-distance internet relationship’ phenomenon. However, despite
social media being very deeply intertwined in the long-distance internet
relationships, this is still a matter that should be investigated from a
more sociological angle. We could quantify the data retrieved in terms
of numbers and mileage, but real insight into a topic like this can only
be sought through conducting interviews or doing a survey.
A serious issue that arises, possibly with doing research on any
social media platform (unless the participants in the study have
volunteered) is obviously the much-discussed privacy. Jernigan & Mistree
who conducted a study on sexual orientation on Facebook, also
acknowledge the inherent problem with privacy and the accessibility of
very private and personal data for pretty much anyone who gets their
hands on a tool for retrieving data from Facebook.
The privacy controls of Facebook, a multi–billion dollar
corporation, offer anemic protection against such an analysis: our model
built from relatively simple network data was mostly unimpeded by
Facebook’s privacy efforts. Future extensions of this work need not be
limited to Facebook and could be applied to telephone call records or
even e–mail transactions, as those communications rely on social
connections. Who is to say that companies are not already doing the type
of network analysis presented here behind closed doors? (Jernigan &
Mistree, 2009)
While the moral code of retrieving Facebook data (without the
company’s permission, by the way) is ambiguous, there is still a vast
amount of data available for extensive social research. Nevertheless,
even the more unaware (of how little privacy they have) Facebook users
have made a conscious choice to join the social network. So, if the
information is already out there and it can be retrieved without causing
any harm or disturbance and not for someone’s profit, the ethical and
moral ambiguity can be left aside for research purposes. (Disclaimer: I
am aware of the controversy of this statement)
My hypothesis would be that despite the apparent benefit of social
media in long-distance relationship, the reality isn’t so obviously
clear cut. On one side we have the positive aspects of social media, as
also outlined earlier – keeping in touch with long lost friends and
people who live far away, we’re more sociable (even though on a virtual
platform), we feel more connected (the “long tail” of the internet lets
us buddy up with people who share the same odd interest as us), we could
overcome social awkwardness, find a companion, our networks are big and
global … But there is also the dark side – starting from internet
addiction and complete loss of privacy (which happens quasi-willingly)
and finishing with sexual promiscuity stemming from the internet. If
using the internet has an effect on our simplest social interaction, and
some argue on our psychology and identity, then it must have an effect
on the relationships that are being “kept alive” through social media
means.
It seems that when our relationships ‘go online’ with the best
intentions, there are a lot more aspects to bear in mind. People get
fired for Facebook statuses nowadays, photos and being ‘checked in’ at a
place can create problems (e.g. someone is being ‘stalked’ online and
the conclusions drawn from the information available on social
networking sites can be ambiguous and for example create jealousy).
Whereas social networking sites make our girl- or boyfriend an ocean
away almost be with us through our computer screens, does that really
substitute the human contact and real relationships? Sure,
keeping in touch is easier, but how valuable is the virtual
communication compared to physical presence? To what extent and how long
will virtual suffice? What kind of problems arise?
Researchers have looked into the questions of identity and privacy
online and that could be a starting point for studying long-distance
relationships over the internet. The methodology and technical aspects
proposed here are painfully vague at this point, but I believe with a
bit of tech-wit and a lot of time, a very interesting sociological
research could be conducted. There is also a problem with how many
people actually reveal their relationship status and location
(truthfully), but as most of the data collection will be done through
qualitative means, this error could be reduced significantly. The scope
of an investigation like this is vast, but embracing other internet
tools such as online surveys and interviews over Skype to name a few, it
could be managed easier. Whether in reality it is do-able, I don’t
know. I know I don’t have the technological savviness for retrieving the
data for the starting point of a study like this, but I refuse to
believe it’s impossible. Nothing is impossible nowadays – and this
statement stretches truly far, exactly because of the much discussed,
criticised and praised social media.
~In my previous post below I focused a lot on the disadvantages of social media. I decided that for this post I wanted to share the advantages of it in order to show that it is not all bad. I like this article that I found because it shares several advantages not on just one social media site but on many different ones that some people might forget exists.
Social media often gets a bad reputation for how it impacts
relationships; however, I truly believe it has the ability to benefit
and enhance personal interactions. Lately, with over a third of couples marrying someone they met online,
we no longer rely on friends' introductions or blind dates when seeking
a love interest. And it's not just for romantic interests, although
that is something that is becoming more popular; social media offers
opportunities for creating and maintaining relationships, whether with
family, friendships or partners.
LinkedIn helps you build a professional network. Social
media is a great tool for building connections as it gives you an
online presence for others to explore your interests and expertise,
linking you to professionals and new job opportunities. Hiring managers want to see
your LinkedIn profile; sometimes they might not even ask for a
traditional resume. It's important, though, to be authentic when using
these tools; despite our motives (i.e. getting a job, promoting a
product) we need to remember that social media pitches can come across a
little too self-serving. Don't send a mass message to your entire
LinkedIn database, for instance; treat online connections with the same
care you'd put in face-to-face.
Twitter is one of the best ways to reach out to companies.
We can leverage our mutual interests to engage in conversation with
users whom we might have been too shy to talk to in person, or perhaps
not even have known how to reach directly. When I interview someone
who's been conversing with me on Twitter, I feel like I already know
them -- and they get a leg up on the competition. With 77 per cent of Fortune 500 companies having an active Twitter account, it's often the best way to connect with brands and organizations you'd like to work with; this man even got a six-figure job through Twitter.
Tinder can expand your dating pool and introduce you to new matches. Just as widening your network is great for professional success, apps like Tinder
can also help your love life by exposing you to potential dates you
might not have met through the usual day-to-day routines. Users are also
able to pick and choose which people in which age groups and social
circles they want to meet. It's a (cheeky) way to step outside your
immediate group of friends, and can make it easier to meet new people
when working or travelling. And at the end of the day, (I am told) it's
fun! Tinder allows users to enjoy a no-strings-attached flirting
experience that can make you feel good. Whether you're swiping right or
left, it's a playful distraction, an outlet to have a conversation and
share your interests. As Bianca Bosker describes it, Tinder is a
high-tech version of the high school sleepover game "do, dump, marry."
Texting allows you to get to know someone in a more efficient way.
Similar to other social media outlets, texting allows you to have a
conversation and get to know someone when you aren't able (or are too
busy) to meet for drinks or movie dates (a familiar feeling for many!).
There's a downside to texting though...the game players. You know the
type: he takes a long time to respond, gives short, cold responses
followed by flirtatious ones. Women tend to like to talk things out and
seek advice from our friends, which often leads to overanalyzing texts
and messages; my advice would be to be weary of reading into things too
much; everyone texts differently.
Using WhatsApp or other instant messenger apps allow you to quickly
detect a player. It's an efficient way of figuring out if someone is
worthy of your time.
Facebook gives you the opportunity to maintain relationships with friends and family, regardless of distance.
Beyond social media's role in dating, we can now stay in touch with old
friends through sites like Facebook, keeping updated on who's getting
engaged, having children, etc. With a few clicks, we're able to share in
others' life experiences, be it old colleagues or friends from high
school. I think online communication can even make face-to-face, offline
relationships stronger; parents are able to keep in close contact with
their children who are travelling abroad or going away to university,
and couples who are in long distance relationships can stay connected
and be a part of each others' lives. There's a reason why Facebook has over a billion users: it works.
At the end of the day, it's about opening up. Social media acts as a form of self-expression and is influencing how
we share our personalities; it's up to us to use it effectively.
Whether it through text, Twitter or Tinder, getting to know someone this
way gives us the opportunity to think about how we'd like to respond.
Being able to talk to someone with confidence allows us to showcase our
best qualities, and lets them see a side of us they may not have seen in
'regular' conversation. There's a slew of rules covering social media etiquette;
it comes down to finding a healthy balance between online and offline
communication. I think the key is using online communication as
something that enhances your pre-existing relationships and helps
connect you to new faces, giving you the opportunity to share your
interests, passions and personality with more of the world at large.
I believe social media is a fun outlet that opens up a lot of
opportunities to create and maintain connections, something that we
strive for, instinctively. There are so many people we communicate with
online who, without social media, we might never have known. The world
really is getting smaller, and we're now connected to each other both
digitally and physically. I read a great quote by Nietzsche that sums
this up perfectly: "Invisible threads are the strongest ties."
Cautionary tales of Facebook fails, Twitter traps, and Insta-gaffes.
By Alyssa Giacobbe
David Arky
ALICIA ANN LYNCH PROBABLY DIDN’T THINK TWICE
before she posted the photo of herself in the outfit she’d put together
for her office Halloween party: a Victoria’s Secret running skirt, blue
T-shirt, and road-race bib, accessorized by a faux gash on her forehead
and bloody, bruised legs. The 22-year-old Michigan resident uploaded the
photo to her Instagram and Twitter accounts, as she had done with so
many photos before, hashtagging it #boston #marathon #runner. Her
costume: a Boston Marathon bombing victim.
It did not take long for the backlash to start. “You should be
ashamed,” tweeted Sydney Corcoran, the Lowell 18-year-old who had been
injured in the attack six months earlier. “My mother lost both her legs
and I almost died in the marathon. You need a filter.” And that would
prove to be one of the relatively kind responses.
twitter
Alicia Ann Lynch posted a photo of her Halloween costume that went viral.
On the day of Lynch’s post, someone else dug up and posted racy
photos she had uploaded to Tumblr. Someone found her home address — it
wasn’t that hard; she had once Tweeted a photo of her driver’s
license — and people began calling and calling and calling her parents,
saying they’d “slit her throat,” and theirs, and tear off Lynch’s face,
too. The mob figured out where she worked and got in touch with her
boss. They thought they figured out where her father worked and gave the
place some nasty online reviews (but had the wrong guy). They figured
out the name of her best friend and threatened to blow up her house and
hang her child. “Nice costume,” wrote someone at the Boston site of
BarstoolSports.com, whose anonymous commenters helped lead the attacks.
“Hope your mom gets cancer.”
Lynch quickly apologized and tried
to get the posters to stop sending her death threats and saying she
deserved to be raped. But the backlash continued into November. She was
fired from her job. Eventually, she released a statement via BuzzFeed,
again apologizing and acknowledging that she could not undo her
actions. “I wore a costume to work,” she said, “with people that know
me . . . ” She had even discussed the idea with a friend whose father
had run the Boston Marathon.
In another lifetime, or even just a
few years ago, the worst that might have happened was that Alicia Ann
Lynch went to her office party, elicited a few whispers about her
costume, maybe was asked to go home and change. Instead, we live in a
time where we broadcast everything to hordes of people we don’t know.
Lynch regularly posted to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. So
do lots of people. Seventy-three percent of adults who go online are
active on social media; among 18- to 29-year-olds, the number climbs to
90 percent. The smartphone has had much to do with this. “The phone has
become the predominant portal for Internet access,” says David
Greenfield, a psychologist and founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction in West Hartford, Connecticut. “Which means you can do it all the time. There is literally no threshold to cross.”
But in doing what almost everyone does, Lynch opened herself up to
the sort of response that typically only happens when people are allowed
to respond anonymously and from afar. And so they do — and they do not
hold back. Many psychologists, including Pamela Rutledge of the Media Psychology Research Center
in Boston, say that social media doesn’t make us meaner or bolder. It
just provides an easy-to-access, very public outlet to air our opinions,
without the worry of face-to-face confrontation. But, as the following
cautionary tales show, the Internet can do a very good job of making a
spectacle of even our most innocuous intentions.
istockphoto/globe staff photo-illustration
#Crossfire PICKING FIGHTS IN THE FACEBOOK COMMENTS
MARC ORFALY HAD JUST GOTTEN HOME from work when the Facebook post
came in. It was late, past midnight. Things were not going well at
Pigalle, the now-closed restaurant he’d owned since 2001, and were about
to get worse. “Really horrible pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving!!” the post
began from a woman named Sandy Tremblay who’d been a guest the previous
week. “I don’t have a clue as to why you would think that throwing
pumpkin chunks into a cold pre baked pie shell and then covering it with
a cream sauce that literally tasted like vomit . . . would in any way
be something that can be called pumpkin pie?”
Orfaly thought
about responding but went to bed instead. When he woke up, though, he
was still angry. “hey sandy,” he typed, then: “go [expletive] yourself!
If you have any questions on how to proceed please call me,” and listed
the cellphone number that, perhaps unsurprisingly, he has since had to
change.
Orfaly would like to distance himself from the
episode — as would his current bosses — but how can he? Google his name
and, a year and a half later, the first item on the list is “Pigalle Chef Marc Orfaly Tells Diner on Facebook to ‘go f . . .”
Tremblay says she’d posted the review without thought of any outcome. By morning, though, “I saw that Marc had responded to me and I was like Oh, my God, this guy is having a conversation with me and it’s not nice.
Everything started to snowball,” she recalls. Orfaly eventually deleted
his comments, but her original post remained, so most of the public
backlash, she felt, was directed at her and not at the guy who’d
suggested that “a good resolution judging from your fat face would be to
give up the pie sweet pea xo.”
Tremblay still feels bad — Orfaly
“told me he got death threats,” she says — but believes that both his
comments and the blowback from other people was a complete “character
assassination” with sexist overtones that probably wouldn’t have
occurred if she’d been a man. She fielded hundreds of calls from around
the world and answered her door more than once to find some reporter
standing there expectantly. “In retrospect, I wish I had written a
completely different post,” she says. “I call things the way I see them,
but I could have done so in a different way. Though I kid you not: The
pie was exactly as I described it.” Still, she admits she would not have
said so to Orfaly’s face. “But because I could sit in my office and
type and not have to have a conversation or even eye contact, it was so
much easier to say what I wanted.” Over Christmas, she got a message
from a friend informing her that she’d made a top 10 list: the worst
smackdowns in Internet history.
The lesson here: Start a fight
online and everyone gets hurt. “There are three rules people need to
live by,” says Dr. Don S. Dizon, an oncologist at Mass. General who
gives lectures to medical professionals on the safe ways to use social
media. “Don’t tweet or post when fatigued, inebriated, or angry. Most
bad behavior is related to one of those three.”
istockphoto/globe staff photo-illustration
#Hooked GETTING TOO SERIOUS ABOUT FUN
NORTH ATTLEBOROUGH MOM of three Mary Abdalla has, she admits, a
bit of a Facebook problem. It was one thing when she could only access
it through her computer. When she was pregnant with her middle child,
other moms she met online provided her with support; seven years later,
she still chats with them on Facebook throughout the day. They’re not
people she knows IRL — in real life — she says, but they’re real
conversations. And now that she has the Facebook app on her smartphone,
Abdalla says, “every time I have a free minute I’ll check it.” She
spends much of her day in the car, waiting to collect her kids from
school or some activity, and so she has lots of free minutes. When she’s
not the one driving, she has even more. “My husband is like ‘Oh my God,
put away your phone,’ ” she says. “He doesn’t get it. He’s on Facebook,
too, but he’ll check it maybe once, twice a month.”
Then came
Candy Crush. Facebook friends had invited her to play — they needed to
recruit others to get more “lives” themselves — and so she gave it a
try. “At first, I thought, this game is so stupid,” she says. But soon
she couldn’t stop. Playing against Facebook friends also let her know
when others were advancing at a more rapid pace. “You don’t want people
to pass you,” she says. Plus, it was fun to look at — “flashing lights
and all these sounds.”
Greenfield, the psychologist, says the
compulsive overuse of social media and its games is fairly common these
days, particularly among teens and twentysomethings. According to one
recent report, the average 35- to 49-year-old spends three hours a day
on social networks. “When you check into Facebook or launch a game, you
don’t know what or whom you’re going to see or how you’re going to do,”
Greenfield says. “It’s unpredictable and very stimulating.” What’s more,
he says, everyone who uses the Internet experiences disassociation. You
think you’re on for 10 minutes when really you’re on for an hour.
One
fortysomething writer I know fell into a bad relationship with
Prolific, a Boggle takeoff accessed through Facebook. Sure, he was never
amazing at meeting his deadlines; he tended to obsess over every word.
(He asked to remain anonymous to protect his professional reputation,
given that you never know what your editors are reading on a Sunday when
they’re not reading the copy you’ve yet to turn in.) But Prolific, he
says, “ruined my life.” Each game is three minutes long and played in
real time, against as many as 20 people at once. “Three minutes is
nothing,” he says. Until one three-minute game turns into 50
three-minute games. Which it has, a lot. Since 2010, he has played
22,718 games of Prolific. That adds up to 1,100 hours, or about 47 full
days.
Six months ago, Abdalla knew she needed to get out of the
Candy Crush clutches. “I was wasting so much time,” she says. “I have
tons of hobbies, but when was the last time I did anything? Like, I used
to garden.” Instead, she spent her time harassing Facebook friends to
play. The turning point was overhearing her littlest boy say to one of
the others: “Mom’s on Candy Crush again. Just get it yourself.” Says
Abdalla, “I tell people now, ‘Do not play the game. Not even once.’ ” #Overshare FORGETTING WHO’S WATCHING
BOSTON ATTORNEY JEFFREY SOILSON
says that social media posts are starting to come up as evidence in all
sorts of trials, especially in family court. Take the mother who’s
supposed to stay sober in order to retain visitation rights showing up
on Instagram with a beer in hand, or the father who’s asked to have
child support payments reduced posting from his vacation on a tropical
island. “This is the kind of thing that is being provided to judges as
evidence,” Soilson says. “You just put someone on the stand and say, ‘Is
this your Facebook page?’ ”
In 2011, Boston College student Dana Snay cost
her family $80,000 with a single Facebook post about a court settlement
her father had reached with his former bosses at Gulliver Prep in
Miami. “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver,” she wrote to
some 1,200 Facebook friends. “Gulliver is now officially paying for my
vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.” Within four days, the school
caught wind of the post and claimed it violated the settlement’s
confidentiality agreement. Earlier this year, a court agreed.
“A big problem with social media as it’s currently designed is that it’s hard to tell what’s private and what’s public,” says Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online,
out this month. “It’s hard to know who’s part of the conversation. Or
how easily things can be forwarded or taken out of context and how
long-lasting comments can be.”
Insurance companies, meanwhile,
are getting in on the action, selling more personal injury endorsement
coverage, which protects social media users in the event they libel,
slander, defame, or invade someone’s privacy. “Many such suits are being
settled out of court, but when they do go to trial, the settlements
tend to be huge,” says Jim Hyatt, a vice president at Quincy-based Arbella Insurance.
“Someone can tweet to lots of followers and instantly put someone else
in a bad place.” By 2012, according to an estimate from the
Connecticut-based reinsurance firm Gen Re,
there had been 36 verdicts in the United States against individuals for
things they had done and said and shared online. The total awards came
to nearly $87 million.
istockphoto/globe staff photo-illustration
#InternetFamous TAKING SELFIES THAT SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME
EVER SINCE SMARTPHONES came equipped with front-facing cameras,
the “selfie” has taken over social media, particularly Instagram. Many
are in questionable taste. Like the one from Florida high schooler Malik
Whiter, who snapped a selfie at school while his pregnant teacher went
into early contractions in the background. Or the one of a woman the New York Post
photographed taking a selfie while a suicidal man threatened to jump
off the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. Magazine editor Jason Feifer
created the Tumblr “Selfies at Funerals” after discovering a bunch of photos of young people taking exactly those.
Maine high schooler Brian Genest was visiting colleges in Florida
when he attempted to take a selfie with a squirrel. The squirrel, as you
might imagine, retaliated. Others are just silly. In late April, Maine high schooler
Brian Genest was visiting colleges in Florida when he attempted to take a
selfie with a squirrel just, you know, because he could. The squirrel,
as you might imagine, retaliated.
What resulted was Genest using up his 15 minutes of fame when a photo
his mother snapped of him running as a squirrel clung to his shirt went
viral.
While this isn’t quite life-ruining — though it’s hard to
believe that anyone would willingly put himself in a position of having
“Squirrel Goes Nuts on Maine Teenager Taking Selfie” attached to his
online footprint — a survey by Kaplan Test Prep found that 31 percent of
college admissions officers review applicants’ social media accounts.
And it’s hard to know how they’ll interpret what they find. “People are
very multidimensional, but their social media tends to be very
one-sided,” says Donath. “It’s difficult to know what image you’re
presenting, who’s looking — and what they’re taking from it.”
Consider
the high school senior and Bowdoin College hopeful whose application
was rejected after she spent an information session at the school firing
off negative tweets about her fellow prospectives. Her grades
apparently were what did her in, but as dean of admissions Scott
Meiklejohn told The New York Times,
“We would have wondered about the judgment of someone who spends their
time on their mobile phone and makes such awful remarks.”
istockphoto/globe staff photo-illustration
#Burned BRINGING YOUR ONLINE LIFE TO WORK
SOCIAL MEDIA has become an important tool for professionals, but
that doesn’t mean the behavior on it is altogether professional. Many
doctors, in particular, have run into trouble. Alexandra Thran was an ER
doctor in Rhode Island when she posted vaguely about a patient on
Facebook. She was reprimanded, fined by the state medical board, and
stripped of her hospital privileges. One ongoing malpractice case in
Texas involves the family of a woman who died during a low-risk cardiac
operation while an anesthesiologist tasked with monitoring her vital
signs was allegedly cruising the Internet on his iPad.
Everybody is online, says Kabrina Chang,
an assistant professor of business law at Boston University, but only a
small proportion — 7 or 8 percent — think that employers would actually
be interested in what they do there. “But, yes,” she says, “these days,
Facebook can get you fired.”
On March 18, 79-year-old Carol Thebarge was the subject of a glowing feature
in her local newspaper in Claremont, New Hampshire. It talked about her
long teaching career, the program she had founded for at-risk teens,
and the scholarship she’d been giving in the name of her late husband,
also a teacher, for the past seven years. “ ‘Local Woman Helps Others
Through Her Teaching’ was the headline,” says Thebarge. “I took the
photos at prom. I won awards in the yearbook. I was like the school
grandmother and the only person some of these kids seemed to be able to
share things with.”
Five years ago, Thebarge had excitedly joined
Facebook. “I didn’t want to be left behind,” she says. She collected
some 3,000 current and former students as friends, but she had rules.
“I’d only warn people once,” she says. “I’d say, ‘Guys, you wouldn’t
talk like that in my living room. Clean it up or I’ll have to drop you.’
And they’d stop. To me, those were teaching moments.” A few years back,
the high school where Thebarge taught asked her to remove the students,
according to its new social media policy, and she did so reluctantly.
“And then they came to me and wanted to know what they did wrong,” she
says. “I was like, wait a minute, this is abandonment.” So she took them
back. And this April, Thebarge chose to be fired rather than unfriend her students.
Thebarge
is unbowed. She doesn’t see how interacting with students on social
media is any different from tutoring students in her home, which she’s
also done for many years. “The message we’re sending is that teachers
cannot be trusted,” she says. “And that’s what kids are hearing. What’s
next — no talking to students in the hallway?” Just the other day, she
had a Facebook message from a student asking for help. “He said, ‘They
kicked me out of school and I’m lost. I really need your help,’ ” she
says. “I said, ‘Where are you?’ I picked him up and took him to lunch.
And I listened. I’m not giving that up.” Meanwhile, she feels she has
been “libeled by inference. My career has been long and fantastic, but
to go out this way was not my plan.”
David Arky
#Duh TWEETING WITHOUT THINKING
North Attleborough 18-year-old Nick Barbieri has hosted a popular
YouTube channel for gamers since he was 15. He lives most of his life
online, tweeting throughout the day both for fun and money. So when the
school cheekily announced there would be (yet another) snow day on
Twitter, he voiced his frustration with mandatory make-up days by
retweeting the original message, “@NorthHigh1: No school tomorrow-see
you in June!” then adding a few hashtags, as well as the words
“[expletive] off.”
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Barbieri
says. “It was really just a run-of-the-mill thing, the sort of thing I
do to drive traffic to my brand.” (He has some 100,000 Twitter followers and another 250,000 subscribers on YouTube). Though certainly he never would have used the word in front of a teacher. He has never once gotten into trouble at school.
The school didn’t take it so casually.
An official called him at home that night asking him to delete the
tweet. He did — but over the next few days was pulled out of class three
times to discuss it. Told he was facing possible suspension, he
ultimately was issued six hours of detention.
But this is one
story that ends happily. Barbieri reached out to the Massachusetts
office of the ACLU on Twitter, asking it to help him “save the 1st
amendment,” and the organization took up the cause. “I’m interested in
setting a precedent about social media rules,” he says. “And I just
wanted to be sure my record stayed clean.”
The ACLU wrote the
school to argue that the administration had no authority to punish
Barbieri for things said off school grounds, even if they were about the
school, and that punishing Barbieri was a violation of his First
Amendment rights. It asked that his detentions be revoked and that the
school issue him an official apology.
That apology part never
happened, Barbieri says, but that’s OK. His Twitter following jumped by
some 70,000 since the incident, in part from the media coverage, and
three months later he still hasn’t run into the school administrator
responsible for discipline IRL. “I don’t know if she would be avoiding
me specifically, and I understand her point of view,” he says. “I think
it was all just a bit of a big misunderstanding.”
~I come from a family that is extremely tech savvy as well as into all of the newest social media sites out there. I have found that social media has interrupted a lot of the time we spend together as a family. Since my family is very involved on social media when I found this article I found it to be a very interesting read. I enjoy my time on social media but I also believe that as children grow parents need to monitor the amount of time they are spending on it. Families need to focus on being involved in one another lives by being vocal rather than finding out through the internet.
Supernanny: Families are being torn apart by Social Media
By Agency
2:24PM BST 11 Sep 2014
Social media is fuelling “narcissistic” behaviour among teenagers which is
tearing families apart, according to the parenting expert known as
‘Supernanny’.
Jo Frost said a generation of young people were growing up unable to
communicate with their parents, while inhabiting a materialistic online
world full of “half-truths” and body-image paranoia.
Meanwhile, their parents are struggling to cope with the economic downturn,
leaving them constantly worried by money worries, Frost said.
The supernanny was speaking about her latest TV series, Jo Frost Family
Matters, in which 60 families were filmed in their homes.
She told At Home magazine that “the overriding theme seems to be a lack of
confidence and trust within families in Great Britain.
Frost said: "I have dealt with lots of teens in my show and the big
problems teenagers are facing is the impact of social media in all forms, as
it seems like it has a heavy negative influence on them.
"Social media sites feed narcissistic behaviour and the need to be
popular and they are being bombarded with half-truths and some facts.
"It creates addictive natures as teens become dependent on their phones,
which has the effect of breaking strong communication and relationships with
friends and family.
"The rising numbers of violent video games, and the lack of empathy that
it creates, leads to antisocial behaviour and bullying is more visual than
it has ever been in our lifetime.”
She called for an “open dialogue” between parents and children to encourage
young people to seek other sources of media and teach them not to feel
negative about body image.
Peer pressure to take drugs and alcohol was another “big problem” the
programme uncovered, she added, while job opportunities were “scarce” for
many young people.
This was all compounded by their parents’ money worries.
Frost said: "For lots of families, the recession brought about a grim
reality.
“Many suffered work-related hardships from unemployment, to pay cuts,
part-time work, women having to take shorter maternity leaves, parents
working longer hours and even losing their homes in extreme cases.”
“These bleak circumstances can leave some families feeling very helpless and
stressed, angry, desperate, and the emotional strain can have a huge impact
on the way that parents react to their children.
"I do think it's important, though, that parents help their children
understand that money worries are their problem and not a burden on the
children's shoulders.
“Although I do advocate making children aware that the family are prioritising
expenses and therefore there might be some things they cannot have
immediately.”
~Marketers now a days use a lot of different social media sites in order to advertise certain products to different target markets. What markets need to remember is that even though social media might be great at leading them to their target market, it also might be misleading.
Social media data is RIDDLED with human behaviour errors, boffins warn
Researchers who heavily rely on social media data when studying human
behaviour have been warned that such information can be very easily
skewed.
Computer scientists at McGill University in Montreal and
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh said in a paper published
yesterday in the Science magazine that trick-cyclists were failing to spot the flaws in the data.
And yet, in recent years, there has been an explosion of studies on
human behaviour using social media as a barometer for all kinds of
predictions about the world we live in now.
"Many of these papers
are used to inform and justify decisions and investments among the
public and in industry and government," said McGill's assistant computer
science professor Derek Ruths.
He added: "The common thread in
all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of
what they're actually analysing when working with social media data."
The boffins offered up a list of "challenges" faced by researchers who glean their statistics from social media data.
Different social media platforms attract different users –
Pinterest, for example, is dominated by females aged 25-34 – yet
researchers rarely correct for the distorted picture these populations
can produce.
Publicly available data feeds used in social media research don't
always provide an accurate representation of the platform's overall data
– and researchers are generally in the dark about when and how social
media providers filter their data streams.
The design of social media platforms can dictate how users behave
and, therefore, what behaviour can be measured. For instance, on
Facebook the absence of a "dislike" button makes negative responses to
content harder to detect than positive "likes".
Large numbers of spammers and bots, which masquerade as normal users
on social media, get mistakenly incorporated into many measurements and
predictions of human behaviour.
Researchers often report results for groups of easy-to-classify
users, topics, and events, making new methods seem more accurate than
they actually are. For instance, efforts to infer political orientation
of Twitter users achieve barely 65 per cent accuracy for typical users –
even though studies (focusing on politically active users) have claimed
90 per cent accuracy.
Despite the blindingly obvious weaknesses found in
such data, Ruths remained optimistic about researchers using social
media in their studies, if they tackle the problems outlined by the prof
and his colleagues.
~Chelsea C.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
ⓛⓔⓣ ⓜⓔ ⓣⓐⓚⓔ ⓐ ⓢⓔⓛⓕⓘⓔ
Social media seems to have more power than congress these days. The word 'Selfie' which means taking a picture of yourself has just recently been added to the dictionary. Along with that, a hit song 'Let me take a Selfie', was released and stayed at #1 on the charts for weeks on end. The selfie craze may sound bizarre to some but young girls and guys seem to post a 'selfie sunday' religiously every week. These selfies have become a phenomenon among the teenagers. Rather than looking natural and youthful, these young girls spend hours dolling themselves up in pounds of makeup and hairspray (on a sunday) to take a very seductive photo. After posting the revealing photo, these girls spend hours on their phones refreshing them to look at who 'liked' their photo. This obsession with their popularity on social media and number of likes they get out of control.
Posted by: Jackie O
Is Social Media Dying?
It seems to me that less and less people are enjoying social media as they once had. Now people scroll through links and videos going viral rather than their friends pictures. FaceBook is now being taken over by marketers and interesting Huffington Post articles rather than relevant photos of your friends and family. Along with marketers taking over FaceBook, it seems the older generation 40-60 are taking a liking to FaceBook. Our parents (and grandparents) are taking over our news feeds and commenting embarrassing things on our pictures. The virtual world that we (us young people) saw as our own is now being taken over by parents posting 100000 photo's of their children. Will us young people move away from this once cherished social network because it has been so saturated?
Why are we moving away from FaceBook:
1. People are posting their annoying political opinions all over.
2. The links and articles are overdone and irrelevant
3. Other social media is more popular (ex: Instagram)
4. FaceBook now posts weird naked girl photos/videos
5. People post photos to brag about their kids
6. The only people who post on FaceBook have nothing else to do
7. Privacy is at stake
8. Facebook follows your Internet movements
9. FaceBook has lost 9 million users the last year
So is the Social Media trend dying? You can decide.
Posted by: Jackie O
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Getting in Fights over the 'little things'
Recently, couples have been fighting over each others activities on social media. Should a girl be upset with her boyfriend if his 'Top 3' snap chat friend is another girl? or vise versa? It may seem like no big deal to the older generation but to generation Y, every move you make on social media is tracked.
Some common fights have occurred because:
Your significant other 'liked' an person of the opposite sex's picture
You significant other 'followed' on Instagram a hot/sexy model
Other people are 'liking' you significant others material on social networks
Your significant other is Facebook messaging an individual of the opposite sex
THE LIST COULD GO ON AND ON...the main common ground here is that anything your significant other does with a person of the opposite sex will get him/her in trouble.
The problem is that there is nothing you can do. Social Media, whether you like it or not, is going to continue getting more and more popular. My advice is to,'don't sweat the small stuff'. You can make yourself go crazy if you try to monitor your significant others activity on every social media outlet. So, step away from the screen and go for a walk outside or find another hobby. Another option is to get off social media. This would force you to invest your time in a different outlet and it will hopefully decrease your stress level.
Posted by: Jackie O
Friday, November 14, 2014
Is Social Media Making You Depressed???
Picture this: Your scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed, you notice how every person is having a great time. There are pictures at parties that seem to be out of a movie and you wonder if you are the only person in the world sitting by themselves on a friday night. Without knowing it, you end up looking through Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for over 3hrs and wonder to yourself why you are so lame. Your friends are posting pictures at a crazy party and you are swimming in envy of their life. A week later you are finally going out with those same friends that were posting those awesome pictures a week ago and you realize that their pictures are nowhere near the reality of their 'girls nights out'
Nowadays rather than friends having a fun night out at a bar, they would rather sit at the bar scrolling through their phone and occasionally asking a random person to take a picture of all the girls to post to social media. We live in a society where are social media self and actual self are two completely different people. The photos that are being posted are exaggerated to make their lives seem glorious and amazing to their high school friends when in reality they are just sitting in an apartment with 5 people. It is not only depressing to the people looking at these photos because it makes them feel like they are missing out on life when in reality the people posting these 'eggerated' and 'fake' photos who are truly missing out on life because they are not experiencing life, they are just documenting it via social media.
This is an interesting study done to show that the more time you spend on social media, the more depressed you become because you are comparing your life to others.
Instead of going out on Friday after work, you’ve been going to the gym and going home early. Your coworkers invite you out for a drink, but it’s on a Wednesday and you use the weeknight as an excuse to bail even though the same reasoning would apply to the very people who invited you out. You’re kind of a drag lately, but nothing is really wrong — you’re just down for some unexplainable reason. A new scientific study suggests that social media may be the cause of your slump.
We’ve all been there: you decide to stay in and relax one weekend, but when absent-mindedly checking in on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you’re hit with a barrage of pictures of your friends having what appears to be a phenomenal night out. Meanwhile, you just ordered delivery for one from the local sandwich shop that’s only a five-minute walk away. You opted to stay in that night, wanting to relax after an arduous week, but now you’re pretty down. Your life is objectively fine, but whether you like it or not, it’s now being compared to your friends’ Instagram stream. Scientists from the University of Innsbrook in Austria have found that — even if you don’t realize it — removing social media from your life may increase your level of happinessbecause you aren’t constantly comparing someone’s highlights to your lowlights.
Conducted by psychologists Christina Sagioglou and Tobias Greitemeyer, the first experiment consisted of 123 Facebook users. They were asked how much time they spent on Facebook, then were surveyed about their mood. The results found that the more time people spent on Facebook, the lower their mood would be.
The second experiment was performed with a total of 263 participants split into three groups. One group spent 20 minutes on Facebook before taking the mood survey, one spent 20 minutes on the internet but not on Facebook before the survey, and the other group didn’t spend any time on the internet and instead immediately took the survey. The results were the same as the first experiment: the Facebook users’ mood had dropped, while the others did not.
Analysis found that the Facebook users’ mood dropped because they felt they were wasting their time on a meaningless activity. As mentioned above, this could’ve been amplified because — as we all know — your friends generally post the exciting, happy moments of their lives on Facebook, rather than the moments where they’re, for instance, sitting around by themselves killing time on Facebook.
The study, of course, needs further analysis. However, it doesn’t take a scientist to figure out why you’d be a bit unhappy watching other people have fun on the weekend while you’re at home doing nothing of consequence. It just takes one to scientifically prove it.
My Advice:
What I have to say is to not believe everything you see on Facebook, Intagram, or Twitter. No matter how fun the party looks, it probably was not as fun as it is portrayed.
Posted by: Jackie O
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Long Distance Relationships: Are they worth the hassle?
The saying, 'distance makes the heart grow fonder' is a line that is familiar to many of all ages. There is no easy way for long-distance relationships to work seamlessly but with the evolution of technology, this difficult relationship is becoming normal for most nowadays.
The relationships long ago did not have the luxury of the two individuals being able to see one another.
So the question remains...With the new technology of today, should couples consider doing/continue doing long-distance relationships? Or is the time away from each other, no matter the technology, still too hard for one's heart to bear?
Pro's of Long-Distance:
Space: you will never get sick of him/her
Excitement once seeing one another
Save money
Stronger bond
Con's of Long-Distance
Spend more money: on travel
Unhealthy: jealousy, missing out on life
Intimacy: may fizzle
In the end, the choice is up to you. If you really love this person and believe they are the one you will find a way to work it out through all of life's obstacles.
The relationships long ago did not have the luxury of the two individuals being able to see one another.