Blog #22: Reflecting onn today's articles

Today we had 2 team presentations, at least we were supposed to. In one class, neither team was able to present on all of the articles, so we had to move to group activities. In the other class, one team was able to present on all of the articles, but the other team wasn’t prepared to present on all of the articles.

One of the first articles we looked at was “FaceBook and Divorce: Airing Your Dirty Laundry.” The most significant thing about this article, in my mind, was the reference to how attorneys use FaceBook, and I suppose they might also use MySpace in the same way, to catch the other spouse in dubious actions. One example showed how an attorney caught a woman, who said she didn’t smoke or party, lying by providing pictures from her FaceBook page that had her doing those things.

The second article, “How Safe is MySpace?” was very focused on the safety of this networking site. Apparently, some people think that MySpace, and probably FaceBook too, should require social security numbers or something similar to prove people are who they say they are and to protect certain age groups from others. Most of the students in my class thought those ideas were stupid and not well thought out.

A third article we looked at was titled “MySpace v. FaceBook Competing Addictions.” This essay was very much like the essays we read previously. A fourth article we reviewed was “MySpace Launches a Free Music Revolution.” This article was interesting, especially after we looked at Pandora and Last FM.
The fifth and sixth articles were “FaceBooking Your Way out of Tenure” and “How Not to Lose Face on FaceBook.” These articles were interesting because the class was able to talk about tenure and what it means. Then we were able to revisit the idea regarding what is private and what isn’t. Regarding FaceBook, the articles were similar and talked about how some FaceBook posts might come back and negatively affect a person attempting to gain tenure, or a person trying to get a professional position somewhere. These articles did have a couple of references to a teacher’s post about her “elderly colleagues” and how if she were the chairman of her department she would make them run for 15 minutes before the meeting so that they would be out of breath during the staff meeting and their comments would be limited. She imagined that this would keep meetings short. She also apologized profusely for these comments since they became very public to everyone at her college.