technology and me

Being a very social person I tend to use many modes of communication to keep in contact with people all around the world. I have several people that interact with me online through msn, facebook and various other profile pages that I have not met in person. However I wouldn’t call most of these people friends as we barely know each other. Where as people I have met and then exchanged modes of communication with share a deeper relationship. I think this is because in today’s society with fast growing technology and the many different modes of communication there are more risks such as people not being who they say they are and all sorts of other dangerous situations. I’ve been using msn as a mode of communication for approximately eight years. I signed up for an account because it was the thing to do, everybody was able to communicate with this mode and those that didn’t have were deemed to be unsociable. Which is odd considering sitting in front of a screen having a conversation compared to looking at some one face to face and talking is probably unsociable. More recently I signed up for accounts on bebo, myspace and facebook and again purely to communicate with people I new and mostly as a result of friends emailing me requests to join their new community. Firstly these sites were used to communicate between friends privately but then the posting of comments to profiles encouraged friendships to flourish. I think that people choose to use these sites to strengthen their ties because generally I find people are more able to express themselves through the internet where they are able to hide behind their screens. These sites mainly appealed to me because I managed to find friends from overseas that I had not seen in years. I would say privacy is an issue for me I try to keep most of my personal information hidden. When choosing to use those sites to communicate the general consensus amongst my friends was that they were reliable and safe. Since i had not heard of any problems with the webpages i decided it was okay to take the risk.