Week 7, Day 2: Final Post Launch

 

            See FINAL POST PROMPT at top of page.

Blog Post #12

Even More Resources:

Feel free to check out any of the linked material here as LINKABLE BACKGROUND MATERIAL for your final post. These items might get you thinking about topics such as online privacy or emotional effects that Internet use and social media can have on people. You also might realize that some of these issues AFFECT YOU.

• This recent article in Fast Company about a 14-year-old girl who "unplugged" from social media and her reasons why: I'm 14, and I Quit Social Media. Do any of her observations or feelings resonate with you?

• Other articles by Fast Company in its project section titled The Privacy Divide. Any of these would make a good jumping off point for a blog post. Do you ever think about your online privacy? Do you take any steps to protect your online privacy? If not yet, what steps might you take to protect your online privacy?

• This article from The Atlantic and how most people don't know how Facebook actually works, how it makes its money and how it profits by invading your online privacy: Facebook Users Still Don't Know. Did you ever stop to really think about what you have on Facebook and what information you've given the company? How does Facebook make you feel about online privacy?

• Other articles at The Atlantic — the thinking person's magazine — about Facebook and online privacy: Facebook in The Atlantic.

• This alarming Bloomberg News article that broke April 4 about the latest massive privacy breach affecting 540 million Facebook users: Millions of Facebook Records Found on Amazon Cloud Servers. On the same day, this disturbing news broke: Facebook asked some users for their e-mail passwords, because why not?

•   This STRATCOM-specific item from Fast Company: I left the ad industry because our use of data tracking terrified me

•  A fascinating look at how Facebook is trying to stay relevant as people shift from permanent online information visible to many toward communicating with smaller groups in ways that are only temporary and don't leave a record: Facebook Could Be Unrecognizable by 2020

Yet more questions to spark your thinking:  

— How large an online footprint do you have? Do you have a personal website?
— Which social media sites do you use? What have you put on them? What have you linked to? 
— What information about you could a visitor glean about you, even indirectly, by visiting your pages on social media? 
— What private information have you voluntarily given out, such as your phone number and e-mail address? To what sites and why? 
— Consider the sorts of questions posed by The Atlantic article: Does social media make people lonely? Depressed? Isolated?