Social networking... the addiction of the future.

As I sit here, checking my Facebook mini-feed for the 10th time today, I began thinking about social networking. It is amazing to me what a phenomenon it has become. Children are joining Facebook, Myspace, and other social networking sites as young as middle school. While I think that it can be a great way to reconnect with family and friends, I think that it also gives children access to a lot of potential threats and inappropriate information. It is so important to teach children proper use of these types of sites and that you create privacy settings to protect your students and children. 

When I was in school we had group chats on AOL, but I remember getting constant requests from people that I did not know. My parents were probably unaware of many of the dangers because they did not know much about how AOL and chat rooms worked. Now, with all of the ways that you can search and connect to people, it is very possible for people find information and impersonate children, which makes it especially important for them not to put any personal information on their information sections of their social profiles.

With how much social networking has grown over the past few years, I can only predict that it will continue to grow over the next few years even more. It is not only important that children use this technology safely, but also that the amount of time that they spend on it is limited, and that their education remains the priority.