Moral panics and concerns with online technology

There are a number of social concerns of the development of social networking, these are mainly because of the ability to access people’s details. Online blogs like “MySpace” and “Bebo” can contain private information that can be used for a number of criminal offences, from fraud to paedophilia, shown in some cases in Second Life. There are also other concerns about the increase of people’s lives revolving around technology. For example, obesity is an increasing problem in the youth of today and this could be seen as being because of teenagers spending time talking to their friends online, using modern technology, instead of physically going and meeting them.
The growing popularity of social networking is changing the way that we interact in that we all use it more and more. As well as targeting the youth culture, social networking is beginning to cater for the older generation with websites such as “Friends Reunited”. Also interaction using this kind of technology is changing by social networking and mobile phones starting to merge together. The iPhone, recently introduced by Apple, has built in internet which enables the user to access portable social networking and the ability to make phone calls and send text messages.
There are issues with censorship and control, mainly with the ability to access another’s personal information (name, address, e-mail address). The censorship and control in social networking was shown as having loopholes, in Second Life, users were able to form secret groups and have meeting without the owners knowing and perform illegal acts such as drug trafficking.