Category Archives: Assignment 2

According to a local news source in Missouri, families have begun to use social media to locate missing people.  This article discusses how social media outlets–Facebook in particular–are being used to locate the missing after natural disasters.  The article goes on to describe the different instances of how Facebook is being used to attempt to locate the missing.  The first case is about Will Norton, who was on his way home with his father from Joplin High School’s graduation ceremony, was sucked out of the sunroof of their Hummer H3 when Sunday’s tornado hit and has not been seen since.

About 28,000 people have since supported the “Help Find Will Norton” page on Facebook.  Recent posts by Presslor reveal the frustration of a family that cannot find a child.  A post on Wednesday afternoon listed the hospitals that already have been checked for the teen.  Another post said the family was attempting to track his cellphone in hopes of determining his location.

I see this use of social media as being a very positive one.  As “bad” as the Internet may seem at times, when it comes to natural disasters or some other type of catastrophe, the Internet seems to be the perfect tool in helping spread large quantities of information through the right channels.  When the earthquake hit Haiti a few months ago and the damage was extreme, Twitter was one of the most useful tools for reporting information and posting images of the damage done to the country.  I think using Facebook to locate missing individuals makes a lot of sense and has the potential to be extremely helpful in the future.

a 23 year old made a huge profit on the death of Osama Bin Laden.  as soon as he heard of his death, Maurice Harary went online and created dozens of shirts promoting his death.  at 12 dollars a shirt he sold 10,000 items by Tuesday creating a frenzy of orders.  it was a great way to take advantage of American pride at it’s highest for profit.  we all know that companies sometimes do unethical practices to turn profit, but do you think Maurice’s shirts are possibly unethical?

A teen was interrogated by the Secret Service over a facebook post he made. Perhaps most disconcerning, they came to his school to interrogate him and did so without his mother present. The boy is only 13 years old. The boy made a comment that the president should watch out now that Osama bin Laden has been killed because of the potential of retaliatory strikes. However, his commented was misconstrued by the secret service to be a threat. This leaves us to wonder: does the secret service monitor facebook this cloesly that they can pick up a single comment such as this and track down a “suspect”? Did they not know the boy was 13? Do they have the right to interrogate minors and is there a cut off for when an individual is too young to be a potential “threat”? Is it is possible that facebook, along with other social media websites, work with the government to allow tracking of comments and material posted on their services?

Clearly, we need to watch what we say on the internet. Who knows who will see what we express. But what if we are too young to understand how to filter and express our comments in safe way?

Twitter is facing new legal actions by an anonymous football player after discovering that many tweeters have claimed to reveal the name of the player who allegedly had an affair with model Imogen Thomas. This is said to be the first action against Twitter and its users. The defendant is desperately trying to keep his identity a secret, so much so that his defense name is listed as “persons unknown”. The football player’s attorneys are claiming that Twitter is responsible for the publication of that information. The popularity of these tweets has very quickly attracted over a 100,000 followers.

Removing tweets would obviously be the best remedy in resolving these little mishaps but Twitter will only remove spam and illegal tweets. Others that have further looked into this situation have mentioned that there’s very little chance that the lawsuit will prevail.

At the time that this article was posted, the London-based law firm representing the footballer had not returned a request for comment. I wonder why, maybe it’s due to the fact that their chance of winning is slim to none. Taking these tweets to heart is silly. Everyone has a right to comment or tweet, as long as it’s not illegal. Now a days messing around with a model is just like going about any average day. So if a random person feels like starting some rumor, best thing to do is ignore! Now this wise footballer is digging a bigger hole simply by making this a public issue.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/if-youth-can-post-its-facebook-status-age-can-too/?ref=facebookinc

While looking through the NY times I found this interesting article about how the older generation is trying to keep up with the younger generation. But from reading this article and to no surprise to me, the older generation purpose of getting involved with Facebook is to keep tabs on their children to make sure they are not engaging in any illegal activities or doing anything that they would not want them to do. There are a number of reasons why older people decide to joined Facebook. Some as I mentioned before joined to keep tabs on their children but there are others who joined to surprise their children or grandchildren in a good way to show that they are keeping up with our generation.

This link is interested because it is showing that even the older generation who probably five years ago could never see themselves getting involved into a social network website but now more and more people in their 50’s and 60’s are signing up for Facebook. They are even going as far as to going to classes to learn the basic in and out of social network website. When I see something like this taking place it just makes me think that just maybe after hearing about how great Facebook is for the last 5 or 6 years that you just end up succumbing to the temptation and decide to make a Facebook page just to see what is all the excitement with Facebook is about. I thin all of us is like this with something in our life. If you continue to hear everybody talk about how great something is, you are going to want to test it out at some point and that is what is taking place with the older adults and Facebook.