Social Networking websites allow people from all the over the world to interact instantly. There is no need to wait for a letter to travel around the world anymore, now all you have to do is just open an instant messenger or Facebook and you able to chat and share pictures. Social Networking allows businesses to expand in terms of advertising and gaining feed back on their products. They can also introduce new product ideas on social networking sites before sending them into the production to gauge whether or not they would be profitable. Not only does it allow companies to build a relationship with their customers, but it also allows them to recruit people to work for them. The article "The Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting" talks about this. Through social networking you are able to post your resume online and advertise yourself, it opens you up to a wider scope of job opportunities and through this, companies can select the exact people they want to work for them instead of waiting for them to apply in person.
The benefits of these technologies to society is that they allow people to stay connected no matter how far apart they are in physical distance. People can form online groups to discuss common ideas and beliefs or educate others on certain events. Through social networking people can post about topics that are too taboo for mass media, they allow people to be confident to express themselves.
Social networking technologies also allow people to start their own businesses and promote them with ease. You can post pictures of your products or service descriptions for free on Facebook and people will see it from all over the world. You can present your talents in a video on Youtube and you might get lucky and become the next big sensation. The article "Moguls of New Media" speaks of examples such as these where two young people, Christine Dolce and a 30 year old Cleveland comedian, who made it big through social networking. Christine was able to promote her jeans and the comedian received over 30 million views on youtube with one of his videos.
The dark side to all these technologies is that people are losing social skills and face to face interactions are becoming less frequent. People rather chat online then meet up in person. Big companies are slapping advertisements everywhere, kids are being bombarded with ads when they sign on to any of these websites. These technologies are changing our values and abilities to function effectively. I think that in the future this technologies will evolve to a point to where we won't have to leave our houses for anything. Office work will be 100% done from home including over the web conferences and file sharing, schools will be all online and teachers will have video lessons and work will posted on a school's own social website. Social networking has it's many positives, but we must not neglect the very serious negatives.
