Monday, August 25, 2008

“Won’t You Be My Friendser?” 3

In paragraph 6 Wurster lays out half a dozen drawbacks of the networking sites. What are they? Do you agree or disagree with any of them? Why?

6 comments:

Unknown said...

The negative effects of using Myspace/Facebook put in the essay are: wasting time on decorating profile, verbal abuse, anonymity, out-of-control spams, risk of losing personal information, and failure to protect children from bad influences. No doubt, I agree with the author's opinion. I signed up for facebook 2 years ago, but I wished I had never gotten near it. Until last year, I was a Facebook addict because I checked my profile whenever possible. During breaks, after school, and class time, I spent my hands on the mouse, clicking here, there, and nowhere.

Unknown said...

As Kyle mentions, the drawbacks of networks are spending time refining pages, openness of the Internet, verbal attacks, and out-of-control e-vites. These are problems of networks as Wurster mentions; however, the fact that Wurster only mentions these problems in only one paragraph out of the entire article shows that Wurster sees these networks as being more beneficial than negative.
I agree with Kyle that anonymity, and risks of losing personal information are major problems with the networks. This can be seen in the article “My Space suicide mother indicted on conspiracy charges (2nd Roundup)” written by Steve Ragan. This article mentions how a girl named Megan Meier committed suicide because of verbal harassment by an online bully. This bully hid his identity by presenting himself as Josh Evans who actually turns out to be the mother of a girl named Sarah Drew. As one can see in this example anonymity has led to suicide. Through this example one can see that networking sites has serious drawbacks.

kristeena said...

In Wurster's essay she argues that Internet websites are useful in connecting to foreign countries and cultures, as well as having other uses. In paragraph six she states the counterarguments as being time consuming, open, over-revealing, unhealthy and most of all, dangerous. Contrary to what Kyle and Hyun Ah have said, I don't agree with the drawbacks of networking sites. Although networking sites have little security and may be considered dangerous, it is up to the user to make them selves safe and protected. On many networking websites such as, facebook and myspace, there is an option to keep your profile limited to friends only. If users were to apply this option on their profiles they wouldn't be exposed to the dangers stated in paragraph 6 by Wurster. Adding a stranger on a network or even allowing a profile to be exposed to all, would be the same as taking a candy from a stranger and telling them your name. Therefore it is up to an individual to be responsible and not make themselves victims by refusing to expose themselves to strangers.

Young Eui Hong said...

The drawbacks of networking sites are: devoting too much time on the sites, verbal attacks, too much openness, security breaches, out of control e-vites and the harming of the youth. The author has mentioned nearly all the ultimate drawbacks of these sites. I completely agree with Wuster on this because I have had personal experiences with social-networking sites. During summer, I used to visit Facebook everyday and communicate and keep in touch with all my friends. However, I later realized that all I had been doing was a waste of time. Instead of visiting everyone's profiles, I could have done more productive activities.

Da-Re Kim said...

The problems that Wurster mentions about the netowrking sites are the time wasted on these sites, dangerous strangers, spam, openness, and younger people who get bad influences. These problems are very true but these sites have been improved to be more safe. These sites are very addicting, people check their profiles every other second. Some people waste a whole day just decorating and looking at other's profiles. There are ignorant people who abuse these sites by using bad language or inapropriate pictures. These sites would be improved if people were more aware of their actions.

dani.k said...

With these pages we harvest unnecessary skills, waste time, which otherwise could be used for productive, health improving activities, they promote verbal violence, excessive partying, security breaches, and endanger younger, more naive generations. Personal experiences have taught me that they are, indeed, and incredible waste of time. If I were to count up the hours I’ve spent using social-networking sites in the past four years, it would be a sickening amount of hours. I could have even learned a new language with this quantity of time, but, instead, I was just there. Nothing exceedingly good came from it. It was the same thing, over and over, day after day, logging on, and having similar conversations with every other friend in the site. A complete waste of my time.