How adults see the internet
I remember a few years ago when MySpace was becoming popular, what a ruckus it caused in the adult community. Parents, police, and politicians (the three dangerous P’s) were all against it because it was putting too much information on the Web and was opening kids up to being molested in the face by the internet. They believed it was some sort of demon that let their kids talk to strangers who would at first chance, molest them in the face.
Then comes along Facebook. Mr. Face (Put-your-full-name-address-phone-number-email-age-and-age-on-your-profile) Book. And boy do the adults seem to love it! Adults everywhere are signing up, parents and teachers alike! I’m not sure what about it it is that makes them feel it is any safer than MySpace. On MySpace, everyone lied about their age, name, location, everything! Only the idiots were posting information that someone could use against them on it. On facebook, your full name, address, phone number, age and everything is right there on your profile! People that you don’t even know can see your pictures if a friend of there’s is tagged in an album of yours. With Facebook, nothing is private. Nothing is even yours! It’s all out in the open.
MySpace is certainly more tacky than Facebook, since users can customize their profile with sparkly obnoxious things, but all of the main things that caused adults to shun MySpace are fully present in the FBook! You can still talk to people you don’t know, people can lie about who they are, you can still post saucy pictures of yourself, you can expose too much information to people, and pervo-rapers can still lie about their age to get to kids. But for some reason, it is ok on Facebook.
I think the difference is that adults have actually tried Facebook, where with MySpace they just judged it based on what they read about it. They listened to the news go on about how dangerous it is and so they believed it was some sort of Internet contraption that sprays you with pedophile attractant. People fear what they don’t understand. But now that adults are finally trying the whole ‘social networking’ thing out, they are seeing it isn’t all bad. They are starting to understand how if you have a little common sense, you can tell who you know and who you shouldn’t talk to. The same people who once asked “How do you know that you are talking to your friend and not some criminal?” are now chatting online with people they haven’t seen in twenty years. They finally realize that the Internet can be a decent place and that not every link you click takes to a rapist hotline.
The old people have finally discovered the internet. Let’s just hope that parents don’t discover Twitter.
(Update:) Looks like Facebook is going back to their old terms of agreement.
be a music video following a story, rather than just random shots of people dancing. The main character would wake up, put on happy music, and suddenly his face would become a smiley face, like the one to the right. We planned to superimpose the face over the footage. He would dance around the street and come across various other people listening to other genres of music, and with different smiley faced heads. For instance, the first guy he runs into is dressed in all black and listening to ‘Crawling’ by Linkin Park, and has a crying smiley face. They’d look at each other, then the sad guy would get a happy face too and he’d go on dancing down the street with the first guy.
