Category Archives: Assignment 5

According to research, the human mind cannot handle being friends with a circle larger than 50 people. In additiona, the brain has trouble handling a social network that has grown larger than 150 people. In response to this data, Dave Morin has started a potential competitor to Facebook called Path. Path is limited to 50 friends or less. It is designed for intimate relationships with close friends and family and to create a more intimate, and personal environment that would be more closed than the service provided on Facebook where friends list often break the barriers discovered in the Oxford research.

Morin claims that the smaller size will allow users to feel less self concious about what they post. But will it really? It will surround a particular identity and part of their life, and as such, there will still be a limit on what content is and is not appropriate. While Facebook may cross more spheres, there are many different places (other people’s walls or comments) where you can express yourself without being right out in the open for other people in your social network to see. Just because you are friends exclusively with close friends and family doesn’t mean you’ll feel safe in sharing certain things. Sometimes, in a crowd you can find anonymity.

what some people do not understand is the emotional effect cyber bullying has on people, especially kids.  this article is about a woman named Tine Meier goes around sharing her story to parents who are not aware of the dramatic effects of cyber bullying.  nowadays people do a form of bullying called “trolling” where all they do is go to different sites and pages to bully people for no reason at all. this womans story is dramatic and people need to listen and do their part to help stop it.  we’ve heard many tragic stories about cyber bullying pushing people to commit suicide over the past couple of months.  although people can avoid cyber bullying by staying off the internet, bullys still pursue them and the internet has to much of a lure for people not to stay away.  awareness to kids and parents is the most effective way to help stop the problem.  when people are aware theyre more inclined to pay more attention to their kid’s activities on the internet.

In a recent article about one week ago, Facebook encountered a privacy breach. It was encouraged that all account users change their passwords yet again. According to the United States Internet Security Firm Symantec, around 100,000 Facebook applications were possibly affected by the breach. If Facebook users accounts were effected, third parties could very easily access accounts, post photos and comments on profiles and view or keep track of personal information.

The only safety zone that account holders may fall into is that most of these third parties that try to get personal information out of users must first get approved by the user. Users have to give these third party applications their permission to access information in their account. Such approvals include games, surveys, online gifts, etc. According to Symantec, Facebook made the necessary changes to prevent future leaks, but users should still change their passwords in order to prevent third parties from using the breach to access accounts.

I recently read an article on CNN.com that gave advice for the best possible passwords one might choose to use so that their chances of security breaches decrease. The advice given was to take any random long sentence and only use the first letter of each word. By doing so, hackers will find it impossible to break through your security code. The way they find passwords is by running every single word through some data base and using every possible option. Take for instance the passowrd “Iltgtc&pwmf.” You would think that it’s impossible to memorize such a thing, but if you convert it back into its original sentence “I love to go to concerts & parties with my friends,” you’d never forget it and you will never be a victim of hackers.

Check out the article link. I found it very useful! http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-06/tech/durgahee.password.security_1_keepass-common-passwords-1password?_s=PM:TECH

This article found in the New York times talks about the ways in which people use Facebook and how perception of ones self and others can be analyzed more critically when viewed online. The author talks about seeing a post for a missing person and before simply re-posting it, to help in any little way, he had to second guess what that post might mean to other people. He thought at first, of course I should post this, but then thought that this serious post might rain on everyone’s Facebook parade.

The message of the article is about the strategic planning that goes into creating a Facebook persona. On Facebook people are just trying to be themselves but when did being yourself ever require planning? People use Facebook to promote themselves in hopes to entertain others with their wit and charm, or to prove their intelligence to others, so when it comes to what people post more thought is usually behind them. The author talks about a conversation he had with a friend about why she didn’t re-post the missing person message; the reason behind it being that she didn’t want people to think that she “was ostentatiously doing a good deed”.

Facebook is an outlet for people to broadcast themselves for others to see, in hopes to create the best version of themselves as possible. In doing this people put more thought into what they post or say on Facebook because nobody wants to taint their Facebook reputation. Personal branding is what we see everyday on the internet, and even if people claim that are just being themselves they are putting a lot more thought into who they want to be when it comes to the ways in which they put themselves out there.