Social Networking

Corporations and consumers use social networking in diverse ways but for the same reasons. Corporations use social networking to find the right candidates to become their employees. While consumers use social networking to keep in touch with family and friends. In a special case, we can see that it change change opinions and rally support for a president. David Carr's article How Obama Tapped Into Social Network' Power, he states how the Obama campaign used social networking applications under one specific movement to create an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally and fight smear campaigns. With these in place, they sent out the message to vote which helped them topple the Clinton campaign then John McCain and then the Republicans.

Some benefits for consumers is that they can voice their opinions on websites about specific products and services. For students, there are websites that rate professors on their teaching therefore a student can learn fully since they know their professors have the same goal. A benefit to corporations is that they can see if the future applicant is qualified for the position. This could also be a disadvantage because it can step the boundary of discrimination. Another disadvantage is the decrease of face to face social interaction. As in Hilary Stouts article Antisocial Networking, it discusses how the technology has changed relationships from offline to online. This also changes the quality of the interaction like experiences to develop empathy, understanding emotional nuances and reading social cues likes facial expressions and body languages. What we can see through technology would be through emoji's which can not replicate what is seen through face to face interaction.