I read this article written by a guy who writes a weekly column on social networking and it was pretty interesting. The article centers around the most recent big-time sporting event--the World Series and the Giants' win. There was a lot of celebrating going on in San Francisco but apparently it quickly turned to rioting. People are now blaming it on social networking sites such as Twitter because most of these riotous incidents were captured via video, pictures, and simply talked about all over the Internet.
People are claiming that those who documented these incidents were encouraging the behavior shown by crazed fans...what do you think? I think Cashmore makes a good point when he says, "The use of the term "cyber" is perhaps the first red flag. Not only is "cyberspace" a wildly outdated term, but headlines alerting us to a new technological threat by way of the "cyber-" prefix invariably turn out to be little more than scaremongering....If the bullying took place via letters sent in the mail, would we see headlines decrying the "letter bullying" trend?"
Do you think that social networking sites are a reason for concern in regards to incidents like this one? Could the mere act of posting a status as to what's going on at a riot (comparable to just simply reporting news) really encourage people to act on what they are seeing because it's on Facebook or Twitter? I don't think so at all.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/04/cashmore.cyber.hooligans/index.html
No comments:
Post a Comment