Social Web Essay

I titled this paper, “Not Your Mother’s Social Circle”, because it will be my goal to not only explain what the social web is, but how as a society we have grown in the last five years, from 2005 to 2010.   However, it will also cover privacy and safety concerns that were inevitable with the social web.   While it is true that we have become more social with the support of the internet, we have also become careless in sharing personal information, therefore leaving us more vulnerable to white-collar crimes.
The first question to be answered is what is Social Web?   According to Farlex, an internet dictionary, the technical definition of the Social Web is defined as, “The social aspects of the World Wide Web which enables people and organizations to contact each other with persistent human-friendly names” (2011).   Although this definition does give an idea of what the social web is, it by no means sums it all up.   Over the years, the social web has expanded into a community that is comparable to the size of a country in its population.   Facebook alone boasts of over 400 million members.
Social websites have been designed as a community in which to keep such interactions organized, integrated, and easily accessible. People can communicate and share information for many reasons and in unlimited ways, which will be discussed as a topic in this paper.   Although we are using the term social web, it has also been called social media and more commonly social networking.
The next question is, how much has the social web grown in the last five years?   It is astonishing how we have grown from standard social methods, to a dramatic marginal growth in how many of us are using the internet to reach out to family, friends, businesses, and making new friends on a broader horizon than our mother’s social circle.   Before the internet, what we refer to as snail mail (postal service), and the telephone were our only way of reaching out to those that were not within walking...