Life on Social Networking

The title of the article I read was called Is Myspace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum.  This article posed a good question, "Are social networking sites beneficial or harmful?" Now this question has been hot debate ever since the launch of sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. The article did a very precise job on answering this question through a series of responses posted by "wise people who spend their days thinking about the issue"(p. 281)


This article was written by not one author, but a series of authors. Each one, with good credentials such as a professor at the M.I.T. media lab, or a professor of psychology at Sheffield Hallam University and social networking site researcher. This lets me, and all of the other readers, feel assured about what the article is talking about. It's not just written by some bums off the street. 


Some of the authors address different questions pertaining to the fact of social networking facts being beneficial or not. One came at it from a psychological perspective, and another talked about how they have changed our lives. One thing that all the authors had in common, was the fact that it helps us keep up with our friends, and what's going on in their lives. One author, Martin Baily, states, "An example is the spread of air conditioning, which makes us more comfortable, but those who grew up before its invention speak fondly of a time when everyone sat on the front porch and talked to their neighbors rather than going indoors to stay cool and watch TV." This is a good statement regarding the question as to whether or not social networking sites are a drawback for communication.


All in all, I believe they all bring a lot to the article and the layout is also interesting, since it looks like a webpage. This article gets a "well done".