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What do you mean by "social media"?
Let's go to one of our favorite social media sites, Wikipedia, for the answer:
Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. [Full article]
You probably use it in some fashion if you use the internet at all. Youtube, Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, Digg — the list goes on. If you're reading this, you're using social media right now! Blogs like this invite participation through comments.
Oh. Facebook. My kid uses that. He's just shut in his room all day. Whatever happened to playing with friends?
While we agree that children (or anybody, for that matter) benefit greatly from face-to-face interactions, we don't agree that Facebook and other social media like it are impersonal. In fact, when was the last time you shared pictures from your wedding when you ran into a friend on the street? Or shared a review from the book you are reading with your neighbor? With social media like Facebook, you are doing this. Not only does it maintain a constant conversation with your friends and family, but it gives you even more to talk about when you interact with them face-to-face.
But isn't it dangerous? I hear about people using Craigslist to meet people and murder them!
Revealing information about yourself to a wide variety of people is always dangerous to some extent. That's why most social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have privacy settings that are highly customizable.
Plus, what's to stop this murder from responding to an old-media ad in, say, the newspaper classifieds?
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