Social Networking

Social networking is a very good place to share some news and stories with friends and classmates. People have a lot of interactions through Facebook, Twitter, Blog and many different types of networking site. I am a facebooker. I realized that there are many different companies and organizations have their own facebook account, such as clothing companies, TV shows, and even colleges. They are using facebook as an advertisement tool for their companies and organizations. We can see the most updated promotions and news about them. As Jeff Young said in Wired Campus, "Many colleges have recently set up official pages on Facebook. I think schools would be very smart to just incorporate in there because it doesn't cost them anything". Not only to colleges, to many other companies is wise to have a facebook account then advertise for free.  Social networking makes people's life easier. People can share their news and thoughts through social networking site. At the same time, we can read others post when we are free to do so. Isn't it sound very convenient? When we are following some of our favorite companies and organizations, we can get our first-hand information from our networking site. As a user, we save our time to do any research about our interested companies. On the other hand, those companies also save a lot of money in advertisement. However, these social networking sites also become targets to those companies to  make more money.  How? These companies get users' information from social networking sites, like your address, e-mail and phone number, so they can sent their post cards or spams e-mail to our contact location. The users seem like losing privacy through networking site. One important thing is that most of the social networking site's information seems to be our real information, because it for connection with our friends and classmates. But if we lose our privacy that way, how many people are still want to share their personal related to any social networking site? According to Fred Vogelstein, there are a lot of facebook "users see the site as sanctified space, a place to engage in intimate conversations with friends—not to be laser-beamed by weirdly personal advertising" in Wired Magazine. If the users are not interesting in those advertising, then they become garbage to us.  This is a real issue that the social networking users need to focus on. Otherwise, social networking (new media) is going to replace letters and phone calls (old media) soon.