j’s scratchpad

Today’s (Thursday, 10/4/07) Talk of the Nation, another fine radio program from National Public Radio (NPR), is rumored to be about social networking and how it isn’t just a thing for young people.

WBUR will stream the program around 2 pm EST. The segment should be in the second hour of the show.

Unfortunately, my local NPR station only carries the first hour of Talk of the Nation. In the time it would take me to find another station that carries the second half of the show, too, I will have missed Andy Carvin’s segment. I will try to tune in later this evening to listen. The audio should be posted online.

Addendum 10/5: The 30-minute segment is definitely worth a listen. Andy shares an interesting anecdote about the Stop Cyberbullying community he helped create and how when Wired listed it as one of the six lamest social communities on the Web in an article that was not meant to be serious, a bunch of people came into the community to bully its members. Both he and Christine Rosen, author of Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism, make some really good points about social networking and how people use the various social networking services. I believe Andy cited a statistic indicating about 70% of young people in areas of the world with good Internet access visit at least one social networking site per week. A few people shared how they use various social networking sites, including a member of the government in California who uses MySpace to share what it is he and his office do. By using technology many young people pay attention to because they think it is hip, he can educate them about what it is he and his office do. Another caller pointed out some of the ways students using MySpace, Facebook, and other sites can get into trouble, like someone under 21 having an alcoholic beverage in a photo. Someone else points out that people can get spammed through these networks. An older sibiling mentions what s/he did to keep a younger sister safe online.

Breaking up online can be weirder than in real life because of instant notification and how some online services notify the other party about the change of relationship status. A woman talks about what it was like to end an engagement, get an e-mail from the online service indicating her ex-fiancee had changed his relationship status with her, and see the network blast a message to his contacts—some of whom are her friends, too, whom she had not yet told—about his relationship status changing from engaged to single.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.