Exercise 2.2

       Welcome back to my blog! I have finally picked a definitive topic for my evaluative essay! For this essay, I am going to be writing about the positive and negative affects that social media can have on a family. Does social media truly draw families closer together? Or does it push them farther apart?
       For this exercise, our class needed to read several pages from the book, Curious Researcher, by Bruce Ballenger. Exercise 2.2 is focused entirely around "Academic Research on the Internet". We were allowed to pick one of the three steps, and I chose the second. This step instructs us to perform a search from one of the following websites:
                            1. www.dogpile.com
                            2. www.mamma.com
                            3. www.search.com
                            4. www.surfwax.com
                            5. www.yippy.com
        After attempting a few searches from some of these websites, I finally landed on something of importance through the metasearch engine, www.mamma.com. From this website, I was able to find a website titled, www.saltywaffle.com. While scanning through what the authors of this website had to offer me and my research attempt, I came across an article with the title, "5 Psychological Effects of too much Social Media [Good and Bad]". In this article, the author, Mitchell Cuevas, says that there are five things about social media that everyone should know.
        First, blogging can make you happier by causing you to feel more connected. The second one is a negative effect, the more friends you have on facebook, the more socially awkward you are in person. A study was done on college students who had more friends on facebook than in "reality" and the results were that the person with all the facebook friends was more socially awkward. However, these results faded over time as the person got older. The third point is negative as well as Mitchell argues that people choose facebook/social media over personal or physical relationships with others. 46% of women chose facebook over spending time with their spouse/significant other.
        Cuevas tries to end his article on a positive note by numbers four and five. Fourth, blogging can improve friendships by making people more able to communicate with one another at a faster rate. And last, but not least, twitter brings us closer together. Psychologists have come to the conclusion that twitter and other forms of social media boosts our "ambient awareness". This is basically being more aware and knowledgeable of our friends lives. Overall, I think that this topic will be very interesting as, like Mitchell Cuevas, I dig deeper into this issue from both the positive and negative sides of this argument.
         As I continued my search through www.mamma.com, I came across another website that proved very helpful; www.parentfurther.com. This website focused entirely on what parents thought about social media as well as a link to another page to inform parents just what goes on through social media and some of the benefits or dangers of internet access. This website offered both their own thoughts as well as posts from other parents who had already experienced their child participating in social media. One of the authors of this website even included a prezi that provides step by step information as to what to expect from social media as well as the best way to control what your child is or is not posting online for the safety and best interest of the child.
        The last website that I landed upon was via www.yippy.com and it was www.cnn.com. While I thought that parentfurther.com was the most informative website I had found thus far, I actually found cnn.com to be even more helpful. These authors wrote on how teens and parents tend to struggle sharing social media. One daughter said that she even blocks some of her information from her mom because she doesn't want her mom to be able to see everything that she herself, or other people, post on her timeline. The daughter admitted that she tries to keep her profile clean and not allow pictures of her from parties or other events to end up on her timeline, but she ended by saying "it's hard to be 100% clean when your entire life is online". Her mother still does not know that her daughter has partially blocked her from access to certain parts of her profile. I think that these websites will prove to be very beneficial as I continue to research and record my findings on how social media affects families. Thanks for reading my blog, and I hope you visit me again!