Face Off with Facebook

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or in a cave, you’ve already heard of FaceBook, and there’s a good possibility you have an account there.  It’s free, and everyone who wants to share snippets of their lives with others has the opportunity to have their web space to do it.  Evidently, a large number of people feel this is an important aspect of their lives.  A Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg started FaceBook, and he launched the site on February 4, 2004.  Its first offering was only to students of the university, but it soon spread to other colleges.  Two years after its start, high schools and some large businesses were added to the membership base.  In September of 2006, it was decreed that anyone over 13 could have an account. In June of 2010, FaceBook claimed that over 400 million members had returned to their site in the past 30 days.  Many of those spend hours online each day, making comments and uploading pictures of themselves and their friends.  Thus begins part of the controversy with the use of this medium.

With so many people sharing information, videos, mailing bags  and pictures, there becomes a basic concept that no one is responsible for what is posted on FaceBook.  People have the tendency to say and present any type of material they want with no censorship or fear that they might be doing something wrong. As with any uncontrolled service, FaceBook is a wealth of misinformation because any fabricated story can be retold and spread so quickly that it sounds like the truth.  As Russell Crowe became painfully aware of recently, a lie can spread quickly and become news.  A slight mishap had the story released that he was dead, and many of the popular celebrity websites carried the erroneous statement until it began to circulate it was untrue.

How can a service so large be controlled?  The truth is, it can’t be under the current setup, and censorship isn’t an option.  People in general, and especially Americans, believe that they should be able to say what they want at anytime they choose.  There is some credibility to a broad statement like that, but responsibility should be the first thought of anyone who posts to the web. Other issues of pictures placed that contain people who may have not given permission come into play, along with the exposure a person gives of himself or herself for saying things that can’t be retracted.  As FaceBook continues to gain steam, it’s unknown how a bridle can be placed on its participants. For the same reason many flock to join FaceBook, many others shy away and close their accounts after a brief experience. Some people are just more or less private than others are.

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Filesharing

Internet file sharing has been a sticky issue that began when Napster had a service for downloading music in the late 1990′s.  Although the courts closed Napster, many other services have cropped up since then.  Some of these are legal sites where participants pay royalties to download the files, and in turn, the hosts pay fees to the relevant person or organization. File sharing on the internet is often done through peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.  Users install software that allows one computer to search for files on another one.  Large files may be broken down and placed on various computers to keep from tying up one computer and to make the total files easier to download without errors.  The many pieces are reassembled by the downloader to make the one large file.  Gnutella is one of the more popular P2P networks.  While users are online, others can get files from their computers while they themselves are downloading files from still other users.  All kinds of files are shared this way, and though movies and music are the two primary attractions, any kind of file can be shared, including dvd duplication software.  File hosting services are the alternative to PSP networks.  Often these are linked to and from forums, blogs, or emails.  In this instance, a larger server or group of servers contain the files that people want to download.  These files can be fee based or free grabbers that entice the downloader to buy into something that does cost money. Many internet users believe anything that is available to be copied from the internet is free to everyone.  This, of course, is not true.  Pictures, movies, and music are all owned by someone, and only those items listed in the public domain are free.  Another  way of looking at the situation is that if something doesn’t cost anything it is worth downloading; however, if it isn’t free, it’s not worth buying.  This argument is given to uphold the notion that the person who downloads only does so because it is available, and wouldn’t be interested if there were a fee attached. The attempted point to be made from this theory is that commerce is not affected by the downloading of music and movies because the people who will spend money for the media will do so anyway.  There might be some thread of truth to this idea, but no research can point to its relevance.  The debate will go on, but file sharing is not going to go away. At some point in the future, it may become the primary way entertainment is distributed.

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