Response to "The Facebook Effect," "Writing, Technology and Teens" and "Social Media and Young Adults"

After doing these required readings, I learned a lot about teenagers, Facebook, and social media. I found all of these readings to be very interesting and filled with facts and statistics I never would have imagined to be true. I mean, let's be honest here, who would have imagined that Facebook is searched more frequently in Google than sex. I think one of the most interesting parts about "The Facebook Effect," was reading about its ability to show the "realness" in anybody. What I mean by this is that Facebook does not judge you on who you are, what job you have or how much money you make. For example, a banker was recently fired for saying she needed the day off to attend to family matters when in fact Facebook pictures later circulated showing that worker drinking and partying the entire day. Facebook even showed its ability to intrude in the life of Sir John Sawers, who is the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Recently, his wife posted Christmas pictures on Facebook that seriously compromised his family's security because they it revealed his address and personal interests. Who would have thought that the head of one of the most private and powerful agencies in the world could be compromised by Facebook?

I think another really interesting part of Facebook, is how people use it to make judgements about other people. For example, in a recent poll, 35 percent of all companies admitted they have rejected applicants based on information they found on Facebook. I found this to be so startling, because in Barack Obama's autobiography, he admitted to smoking marijuana and even doing cocaine, yet he is the President of the United States and arguably the most powerful man in the world. I think this is a really interesting example, of how it's important to consider the platform in which you are projecting information. Had President Obama arbitrarily posted on Facebook that he had used Cocaine, it would have caused absolute outrage, but when it was mentioned in his book, it really was not a big deal. This showed me how people are easily judged through the information they put on Facebook, and as Jared Cohen, a Google executive said, Facebook is really a "digital democracy" in terms of how easily people can be judged from what they post on their profile.

One last thing I would like to touch on, is some of the interesting stuff mentioned in "Writing, Technology and Teens." Something that I honestly found to be disturbing, is how research is showing a connection between the online writing of teenagers and the writing we use in the classroom. At first, I thought to myself, there is no way I would ever write the way I do on Facebook or AOL as I would in this blogpost or an academic essay, but then I realized, it happens all the time! The fact is, nearly 50 percent of teens admit they shorthand their writing on the internet, and it's spilling over into our academic writing. I found it really interesting that the internet is able to have such a strong impact on our thinking that we are subconsciously are writing u instead of you, in the middle of a research paper! As technology continues to progress, I think it's crucial teenagers find ways to separate their online writing from in school writing, or this may become a problem an even bigger problem than it already is.