Second Life

Another kind of social networking is the "virtual communities" and one of the most famous and well developed is called "Second Life" which is basically a multiplayer online game which characteres lives in a virtual world, where they can interact with each other, having a real life with work, friends and trips. However "Second Life" can be more than just a game for entertainment, because nowadays it has been used for bussiness school students to test entrepreneurial talents, for some kids to improve social skills and several another activities to develop certain disabilities. The game is helping many people with different kind of issues such as abused children, adults with cerebral palsy and sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome, because they are personally and emotionally involved in the game, which helps a lot their treatment. Besides that as I said in the beggining, companies and businesses schools use the game to help the development of businesses skills and basically what they do is similar to the real life, start the businesses, advise something already in existence and in the end they see who is the most successful. Therefore, the "Second Life" is being used  for entertainment as well as serious purposes, due to its flexibility, being really useful for society in general.

YES WE CAN

Obama also posted some videos from his speeches to propagate his messages on YouTube, and this is really interesting! Check it out!
"Yes We Can" speech by the hip-hop artist Will.i.am

Social Networking in Obama's Campaign

During his campaign, President Barack Obama had an intelligent perception to find something that would different from other candidates and at the same time help him reach success: using social networking tools. First of all Obama created his own website called http://www.my.barackobama.com/ known as MyOB. Of course, most of the candidates had their own websites, but Obama put many technologies in his campaign, and it was well-developed. Basically he had dominated the new media during the political season, which was perfect because americans are much more able to access media contents and they are getting more and more used to socials networking. The company which made all this work for Obama is called Blue State Digital and they developed really eficient tools for MyOB. This allowed supporters to donate money, organize mettings and distribute media online. They also created tools for Obama`s campaign using SMS, phone tools and Web capacity. Besides that Obama used different types of social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and he was successful making many followers in these websites. Obama recognized that by putting his message online between all these different tools, his suppoters would spread a lot, and in fact he reached this objective.

The Social Network Official Trailer

Check out this movie about the creators of Facebook, one of the most famous website of social networking! Really interesting!
And visit the official website for more information: http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/

Issues on Social Networking

When we think about social networking, one of the first things that cames to our mind is the dangers caused by being online for a long time. The main thing that we are concerned about is how our children are dealing with that. Nowadays with the improvement, increase in technology and digital tools, many children are growing up online, spending many hours per day just sitting in front of the computer, instead of doing healthy activities, being a serious problem in present society . Adults are concerned about it, because the internet can provide many dangerous sources for kids, being able to have a private social life or to create their own fake worlds are some of them. Another problem is related to learning at school, teachers have many problems because first of all this generation is getting used to use abbreviations as much as possible and they usually don`t read books or newspapers. Another threat, which is the biggest worry for parents and adults in general is the fear of "sexual predators" and "cyberbulling" because all of the kids are exposed to suffer things like this online and sometimes they don't know how to deal with this kind of situation. Therefore parents should analyze what their children view on the internet and then should take actions by limiting what their children are exposed to on the web.

To get more information about this topic go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/#  and watch the program called "Growing up online"