Project Five

2009-04-29T12:42:00.001-07:00

For years and years we have been looking for more ways to communicate with each other and do it in a faster way. Also we try to communicate with people who are further away. It all started with the Phoenician’s who developed an alphabet in 3500 B.C. to 2900 B.C. In 1994 the World Wide Web or better known as the internet was released for the people. Now it’s as if we are relying everything on the internet. Almost everything is done online nowadays such as, taxes, payments, shopping, and even talking to friends and family. However, I would like to talk about the social networking websites. One website that we all heard of is MySpace. It is really starting to affect our culture in a bad way. It is so popular that even Microsoft Word corrects it when it’s wrong! (I just saw this when I didn’t capitalize the S.)

MySpace has been around since July 2003 and it is truly amazing how much it has grown throughout the past few years. I remember the first time I was introduced to MySpace. I believe I was still in Middle school and in the seventh grade. I also remember how it was the only thing kids can talk about in the school. I think it is still like this today, but at a lower level because there are other social networking websites that people go to.

These social networking websites causes a lot of problems in our culture, especially MySpace. It is making all of us who use it, lazy and slack off. Instead of doing homework or doing the dishes, people nowadays would rather go check their comments or messages or what new friends they have on MySpace. It is very time consuming and it gets people to slack off. Nowadays, MySpace added the little games onto their site which help people get more off track. Also, the way how ones MySpace page can be customized is a big part of the time consumption and slacking. People want to make their page different from others. I mean to be honest? Who wants to have the same page as another person? No one, we are all special in a way and in a way people make their page show who they are.

Another problem with MySpace is that people like to have full out conversations with each other by commenting each other back and forth. What happened to the old days where if we wanted to talk we go meet up with the person and talk to them face to face? Our country has many obese people and we try to lower the percentage. With MySpace, it makes people not want to go out to talk to people or they just get too caught up in a game or something. If people just stay in front of the computer all day looking at MySpace, they do not get any exercise. You don’t need me to tell you that this is bad for us.

I also found this one problem where people go on another person’s MySpace to talk smack to another person. I believe there is one story that made it to the news. This 16 year old girl commented a cheerleader provoking her. The cheerleader gets her friends which are more cheerleaders, and they all decide to bring her over to their house and video tape the beating of the 16 year old. This was all because of the popular social networking website, MySpace. If people do these types of things over a stupid comment, what else can happen?

Also, more and more pedophiles, stalkers, and online predators are starting to emerge from the use of MySpace and every social networking site. We all know there are those people out there who we see to be sick in the mind or despicable. People lie about their age, they try to find out where they live and try to meet up with them. This is when something bad happens. This defiantly changes our culture from how it used to be.

All in all, the social networking website MySpace changes our culture and makes things worse for us. This site make us lazy, slack off, waste time, etc. Not to mention it is unsafe at times with all the violence and predators out there. This has made our culture look bad. Truly, I believe that these sites should be eliminated.

Sources:

http://www.webupon.com/Social-Networks/Five-Reasons-Why-MySpace-is-a-Bad-Website.318035

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_history_of_communication.htm

http://www.progressiveu.org/173915-16-year-old-beaten-six-girls-over-myspace-comments

English 1020 Project Five

Project Five