SWE - Fall 2007 - (Page 38) people standing in a three-block radius, and then recommend dates. Public-Private Dilemma Students today understand the online etiquette of social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace, but they struggle with defining what kind of information is public and what is private, said Steve Jones, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a senior research fellow for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Most social networking sites feel private — as though the students who use them can restrict them to their friends. It’s not immediately apparent that the entire Internet can have access to you,” Jones said. “Students might put information on a site that they wouldn’t want the public to see. In some sense, there is no such thing as private when it comes to the Internet,” Jones said. “If just one person gets a piece of information and posts it elsewhere, it will become public.” Indeed, cultural norms are changing about the very definition of sociability. “The notion of friends is changing. One set of friends is from ‘real life.’ Other sets of friends may be from different media,” Jones said. “The extremes are that we may end up with many more friends with whom we feel very close [because of FaceBook and MySpace], or we may end up feeling we have too many, and focus only on a few.” Jones said it will be interesting to track how young people today keep in touch with friends from high school and college, since many adults have lost track of their peers after college. “There is a potential for a perpetual class reunion,” Jones said. “I think the social-networking sites have the potential to reshape how people interact with each other long-term.” At the same time, the social-networking sites have come under criticism for subjecting young people to predators. MySpace announced in July that it had identified, removed, and blocked 29,000 user profiles of convicted sex offenders, as part of a program to protect its young members from adult Redefining Social Interactions A telling moment for Professor Ellen Granber, Ph.D., was watching her introduction to sociology students go outside to talk on their cell phones during every class break. “They all went off in their own directions,” she said. A few students got to know each other during the “May-mester” course, a short-term session that lasts two weeks each May. “I talk to students about the degree to which everyday-life activities can now be accomplished without a single human interaction,” said Dr. Granberg, who stressed that she is no Luddite. She cites examples such as shopping, buying music and watching movies, all of which can now be done online and in one’s home. Students now may choose to interact mostly with those whose interests match their own, to a degree that is unprecedented, Dr. Granber said. “In the past, if people who love Thai cooking and Randy Travis didn’t live in the same city as you, you had to take whoever was there,” she said. “Now, you can eat Pad Thai while being logged into your Randy Travis affinity group. It’s being able to tailor your interactions to your tastes exactly, rather than going with the flow.” “People have always had a preference for others ‘like us.’ Technology makes it so much more possible and so much more precise and multi-dimensional. Students have no idea that their world is different from their predecessors’ world,” she noted. Dr. Granber believes part of the expectations of today’s tech-savvy generation lies in how middle-class parents raise their children. Middle-class parents enroll their children in programs to enhance each child’s unique talents and abilities, as explained in Annette Lareau’s book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. The upbringing causes the children to have a sense of entitlement. The children grow up to look at the world as one that will mold itself to their desires, and in which they will find their unique niches. Joanna Robson, who graduated in June with majors in Spanish and psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, disagrees that students use technology to fold in on themselves. Robson, 22, received the UCLA Chancellor’s Service Award, volunteered more than 1,000 hours to community service and served as president of UCLA’s Bruin Belles, the student philanthropic and leadership organization. Robson said she has met many interesting people in her volunteer work, and that they maintain their friendships via technology. Robson volunteered at a homeless shelter and was moved by the unique personalities of the recovering alcoholics and drug addicts who worked there, as well as the homeless. She also set up meetings of the Bruin Belles by text-messaging members, and rallied support via Active.com for a walk to raise money for abused and neglected adolescents. “I can text-message 10 people at the same time. It’s so much faster and easier than calling each person,” she said. 38 SWE FALL 2007 http://Active.com
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