Social Networking

Social Networking by Patrick Murtagh

 

 

The article that I found was to do with teenagers and social networking. The article, however, is not talking about how much teenagers’ lives are being taken up by Facebook or Myspace, but informing us that teenagers are actually a minority of people on these social networking sites.

The article begins with a reference to The Irish Independent’s headline which read “Twittering teens add hundreds of words to the dictionary.” This is half right and half wrong, according to Sarah Carey. It is true that due to social networking sites, such as Twitter, 267 or so new words have been added to The Collins Dictionary.

 Words that describe feelings such as “meh” and “lol” (laugh out loud) were added to the dictionary due to their great use on the internet.

 However, the use of the word “teens” is incorrect. Teenagers make up a minority of the people actively using these social networking sites. Many people will read bout Facebook, Bebo, Myspace and Twitter and get the impression that the entire world except themselves is using social networks and so set one up to see what all the hype is about. Upon realising that it is completely useless to them, they forget about their account and never use it again. Thousands upon thousands of the figures we read about that make up the users of these networks are dormant, and so, while millions of people do in fact use them, many of these figures do not represent the amount of people using the networks on a daily basis.

On Facebook, for example, teenagers make up a mere 9% of its users. Half of Facebook users are over 26 and the majority rises to people over the age of 35.

This article shows that the panic and concern over teenagers using these networks is a flawed logic. While many teenagers do use social networks to post inappropriate pictures and so on, most don’t. Most teenagers who use social networks do not come in to contact with paedophiles, and most who do, realise and leave the conversation.

 What I would like to know is: why is it that teenagers are branded as the people who use social networking sites religiously, when according to the figures from these sites, they are in fact the minority of users?

To view the article by Sarah Carey...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0902/1224253663035.html