Name: Ayeza Ali
Class: WRT 101
Professor: Dr. Drozd
Date: 12/03/13

Social Media: A Path to Societal Decadence?

With the public promulgation of the internet in the wake of 1990’s, a new era dawned upon humanity. What once used to be a time of familial gathering after dinner to savor stories from the past became the internet surfers lone time. Today, as one strolls along roadside cafés, subway trains, or sits at the campus cafeteria, the so called “social arenas”, all that he’d come across are familiar faces entangled in a world of their own. Headphones covering their ears and faces lit with the bright glare from their electronic devices, they have isolated themselves from society. The social engineers say that we are more “connected” to everyone with the help of the social media, but sadly the truth is that we may have a thousand friends on facebook, but at the end of the day we are still alone, sitting at some Starbucks, head buried in our laptops, scared to even talk to the person sitting right next to us.
The foremost predicament that one faces at the hands of social media is unwanted exposure, little known fact is that we have almost next to no control over the information we share over social networking websites such as Facebook, My Space or Hi5. Although the websites do accommodate privacy settings but these settings can be easily over-ridden or bypassed by experienced computer hackers in a matter of seconds. Leaving most users highly susceptible to identity theft and fully exposed with critical information such as place of work, school, family members and sometimes even the place where they are at, at any given moment in time.
With there being limited or almost no control over personal information online there comes a huge risk of security at hand, according to Daily Mail it has been estimated that 12,300 cases of murder, sex predation and rape