Social networking has become an internet phenomena with millions of people all over the world signing up to different sites.

 

But for many the point of the sites has escaped them.

Reporter CHRIS BURTON explains whats possible on the sites, examines the growth of networking and asks, does facebook have a dark side?

 

As more and more people use the internet, the advantages of social networking sites (such as facebook, MySpace or Bebo) continue to grow. Social networking sites work more effectively when you have a large number of people regularly using them.

 

It is only recently that it has been possible to remain in close contact in an instant with people from around the world. Email is a very useful tool, but social networking sites take this and improve on it to a great extent.

 

 

With social networking sites it is possible for people to find and contact you much more easily. It is nearly impossible to find out an email address of a friend just from knowing their name. However, knowing their full name and location will pretty much guarantee that you find their profile on a social networking site.

 

 

This means it is easier to find people you’ve lost contact with, such as relatives or school friends. Once you’ve found one old friend, you usually find that several more follow because you are now included in your friend’s network and the people in your friend’s network can now see your profile as well.

 

Social networking works better than email because it’s not just about contacting friends and family. It’s a place where people play games against each other and it is also a place where people store photos of memorable events. If a photo contains other friends in them, it is possible to ‘tag’ your friends. This sends each friend a message saying that a photo with them in it has been uploaded.

 

 

However, it’s not just the people in the photo that can see that a photo exists of you. A message could appear on the profile of any of your friends informing them that you have been tagged in a picture.

 

 

This is true of everything that you do. Whilst it is possible to change your settings so that people can’t tell that you’re online, it is not possible to hide certain parts of your profile from your friends. If you write a message that you make publicly available on a friends profile, then your friends are likely to be informed that you have done this and they will be able to see what you’ve written.

 

 

In addition to this, your own profile contains a brief history of everything you’ve done. If you’ve commented on a photo then that will be listed. If you’ve played a game, then it will list which game you’ve played, when you played it and how well you did in it. If you add a new friend then that will be listed too.

 

 

This is both a good and bad thing for social networking. The idea that all information is free to everybody is what allows people to find friends and family that they haven’t seen for decades. It also provides a small sense of community; since it is possible to see what your friends are doing at any given point.

 

 

But this is actually part of a larger problem. Many people don’t understand how social networking sites work. Once something is written on your profile this can be seen by everybody on your friends list. Unless you tweak the privacy settings, it’s often available to be seen on the entire internet too.

 

 

Once you place something on the internet, there is the potential for it to be seen by anybody. That’s not just true of social networking sites, that’s true of anything you posted on the internet at any time. It is easy to believe that as you are on a computer, that everything you’re writing is hidden away, much like it would be in an email.

 

 

This was the case in July last year when a young footballer who was playing for Crystal Palace at the time was offered a trial at Fulham. Ashley-Paul Robinson changed his status to read “Ashley-Paul is travling[sic]2 Bath With Fulham Fingers Crossed” without realising that this was available to the entire world, and not his list of Facebook friends.

 

 

Unsurprisingly, both he and his club were contacted by the media in order to find out what was going on with the player. This led to an updated status message the next day which read “Ashley-Paul has been very naughty lol!” so we can assume that he found it funny at least.

 

 

In a personal example, a good friend of mine decided to start flirting with another friend of hers on Facebook. This began to raise a few eyebrows; not least her boyfriends. However, rather than say anything at the time, he watched the budding romance develop until it got into decidedly risqué territory and then confronted her with everything she’d said.

 

 

I’m sure nearly all of us have been through a break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend at some point. Usually, there are a lot of accusations about things that were said or things being misremembered and taken out of context (or maybe that’s just me). In this case, none of that applied because there was a perfect record of everything that had been said. It’s hard to argue that nothing has happened when a word for word account exists.

 

On another occasion, I was contacted by different friend of mine who had recently broken up with her boyfriend and left a less than complimentary message about him on my profile. Apparently, he’d been in contact with her to ask me to delete the message she’d left me, because he felt it reflected badly on him and he didn’t want people to hear of their break up through my profile.

 

 

All of the above stories are relatively harmless. That’s not to say that the people involved weren’t hurt, because they were. But it could have been much more serious.

 

 

Recently, America had its first court case relating to cyber bullying. Lori Drew, 49, was accused of driving a teenage girl to suicide after posing as a teenage boy on MySpace. Allegedly, Ms Drew sent the girl a message telling her that nobody liked her and asked the girl ‘why don’t you just kill yourself?”

 

 

Although Lori Drew was found not guilty of this offence, she was found guilty on three counts of violating the websites terms and conditions. No sentence has yet been handed down, but jail time is possible.

 

 

Another recent case from England resulted in a man stabbing his wife, shortly after he had moved out of their property. Wayne Forrester killed his wife after she had updated her facebook profile to show that she was ‘single’.

 

 

Fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, Mr Forrester drove to their former house where he attacked her with a kitchen knife and a meat cleaver and stabbed her in the head and neck, whilst pulling large clumps of her hair out.

 

 

The sister of the victim described the attack as “a brutal, callous attack on a defenceless woman” and it is difficult to think of it as anything else.

 

 

The action taken by Mrs Forrester was something you see all users of a social networking site do on a regular basis. People update their profile to reflect their current moods, their current thoughts and their current status. It is horrendous to think that doing this could incite someone into a murderous rage.

 

 

Mr Forrester stated that he loved Emma and that he was “totally devastated and humiliated by what she’d done”. I think it is safe to say that she did not know that simply changing her relationship status to portray her current situation would lead to her death at the hands of someone just because he felt he was being embarrassed publically.

 

 

I don’t mean to portray social networking a great evil which must be stopped. However, I do think that people need to be educated more on what the purpose of social networking is and the various things it can be used for. As stated at the beginning, social networking has many great advantages.

 

 

More than anything, I think that we need a greater level of education about online activity. However, even people who are web savvy occasionally don’t realise that their online movements are easily traceable and that giving yourself a screen name doesn’t necessarily mean you’re hidden from everyone.

 

 

David Pollard was an avid user of the Second Life website. Second Life is different from social networking sites in that it actually creates a virtual world that you can explore with a character that you create (known as an avatar). You then use this character to walk around, interact with the environment and interact with other characters they meet in a variety of ways.

 

 

Mr Pollard found a girl he liked on the website and started talking to her. Soon, things got a bit heated and their characters started engaging in sexual intercourse on the computer screen.

 

 

This moment was cited as the grounds for divorce by David’s real life wife, Amy Taylor, who found out that her husband was cheating on her online.

 

 

This does raise the interesting question of whether this does constitute cheating. After all, nothing physical has taken place between the participants. However, the intent is also clearly there. Amy obviously decided that she did class it as cheating and couldn’t be with him any more because of it.

 

 

Social networking is far from perfect, but it is a very good tool that continues to develop thanks to user participation and has notably helped people draw closer together as a result of it.

 

 

I am not someone who wants to hold the internetaccountable for every incident that occurs on it. In the cases listed above, I do not believe that the websites named were responsible for the action. Someone who is unstable enough to murder his wife would have done so whenever the news got out that they were no longer together. Someone whose partner is going to cheat on them will always find a way to cheat on them. Someone who is receiving messages of a threatening nature can always report the user and the messages.

 

 

There are people who want to regulate the internetmore strictly. This was seen in the House of Commons last year, where a Conservative MP, John Wittingdale, was chairing an enquiry about the potential dangers of the internet and computer games.

 

 

In this particular exchange, he was speaking to the person in charge of safety at Bebo, Rachel O’Connell. He asked how old people had to be before they were allowed to use Bebo and was told that they had to make the age 13, as this complied with US law. He then pointed out that his daughter, aged 12, spent hours on the site every night. This then provoked laughter from those at the enquiry when he was told that she should not be allowed on the site and that her profile should be deleted.

 

 

In the end, we can only expect people to look after us to a certain degree. There comes a point when we have to learn to look after ourselves and take responsibility for the things that we willingly post on the internet.

 

 

Once we manage this, then we will be able to enjoy the many benefits on offer without fear of reprisal.