Main Theme

"Ideas shape the course of history" - John Maynard Keynes

This is the concluding section of the Main Theme that has featured in Issues 2 and 3 of Volume 1.

Social Networking - Risks and Rewards - Advice from Facebook

The start of a new Main Theme that will run over the following two issues.  This is a major "ideas" revolution that, hypothetically, is of vast benefit to mankind in the areas of communication and dissemination of information.  But such benefits carry risks in their back pockets.

Disturbingly, the greatest risks seem to have affected one of the most vulnerable sections of society, the young.  The dangers inherent in the uneducated use of social networking sites such as Facebook, My Space, and Twitter- amongst others - have to be offset against the somewhat dubious benefits that they may confer.

Here is advice provided by Facebook itself as a guide to the safe and desirable ways and methods by which their service should be used.  It would be wonderful if true that users of Facebook - and similar sites - could be relied upon to follow the advice.

Cyberbullying - Advice from CEOP

Here we provide some of the more extreme examples of tragedies resulting from the unsupervised and undetected abuses of social networking media, collated from a variety of news sources.

Pros and Cons of Social Networking - Sabine Kurjo McNeill

This is the initial draft presentation from Sabine Kurjo McNeill, an innovative thinker, writer and networker, whose book Only Connect anticipated the social networking "revolution" by more than one decade.

Extreme pressure of work in more immediately pressing problem areas may restrict her ability to continue this presentation, but her activities will continue to be available via her websites and her professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn.   Details of these contact points are provided in her biographical data.

We are also pleased to be able to include her poem Only Connect in our Verse section here.

Networking Group Experiences - A "hotch-potch" of views

Here are provided some personal accounts from people who have joined social networking sites such as Facebook and, while not suffering the extreme experiences described in the Cyberbullying section, have reason to regret their involvement in these social media groups.

Social Networking and cyber-bullying book reviews

Your attention is drawn to two book reviews in the Book Review section, both of which are relevant to these themes: Michael Mallows review of Cyberbullying and E-Safety by Adrienne Katz and Joe Sinclair's review of Identity Problems in the Facebook Era by Daniel Trottier.