Twitter's Effect on Today's Society

The effects that are constantly affecting our society come from different sources such as politics and the economy. But now let’s focus on positive and negative effects on our society, a personal and popular web site such as Twitter.

According to some websites “Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers.”

Now let’s go back to September 11th, 2001, Where people noticed what was happened? When you heard about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center? How long after it happened did you notice? For those lucky enough to be near a television, they probably found out a couple of minutes after it happened. Some people probably received phone calls at work or even at home, while others didn’t even find out until they knew it by others.

So, let’s think about how long it would have taken you if it had happened at 2010. Almost every person would have found out about it within 15 minutes of it happening via a simple text through Twitter. With all the ways people are connected today, not finding something out within an hour puts you out of the loop. It is now a rarity when people are not advised of big news. It is almost unnecessary to say, “Hey, did you hear what just happened?” because people now are really connected to the entire world with new personal websites.


But as there are positive effects, Twitter has its negative side. Here is a brief example of this part. According to a new that was published on a site, “Twitter Hits 50M Tweets a Day as Cybercriminals Watch. Fifty million. That’s how many tweets Twitter users send every day. It’s the latest stat in a micro-blogging growth story that has taken the social-media world by storm. But as corporations, celebrities and important people join the fray; cybercriminals are lying in wait with spam scams.” This news has been a controversy in the social and economic fields in the population now a days.

To make this part of the effect more understandable, Twitter accounts in differerence with others have been stolen and fetching at a very higher price than others among criminals by cybercriminals. For example, a single Twitter account is sold for $1,000 with only 320 followers.

A 2008 report found that “cybercriminal organizations were maturing into “mafia-like” outfits, and were becoming increasingly efficient at data theft due to their new-found structure. Competition between criminal groups has dropped the prices of previously valuable intel, credit card numbers and bank log-ins used to sell for $100 or more, at the time of the report they were selling for $10-$20 in some cases.” I think that prices have fallen even more by today.

We have been really affected by today’s technology even if it’s for our welfare and/or our privacy. Now, technology and cyber worlds have created a new lifestyle for all of us. As the example I mentioned, now technology lets us communicate more efficiently with others around the world than a few years ago using texts and images through various web sites. But it also damages our lifestyles through new popular sites, creating and making cybercriminals’ lives easier to hack into people’s accounts and steal their goods. So we should try to raise awareness about what we post, and about which people we accept on our personal websites because even if you don’t know the person, that person could really harm you and the ones that surround you. We can make this a better world or cyber world if we take part on what’s going on with our society.

Bibliography
Admin. relevant news. 28 February 2010 http://jackskin.com/2010/02/25/twitter-hits-50m-tweets-a-day-as-cybercriminals-watch-newsfactor/.

Boyle, Alan. Is twitter evil? 28 february 2010 http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/04/14/1891640.aspx.

Freeman, James Alan. Sharing Information. 28 February 2010 http://fbme.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/how-sharing-information-has-changed-twitter-effect-today’s-society-by-james-alan-freeman/.

STELTER, BRIAN. Twitter News. 28 February 2010 http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html.

Claudia López