To be honest, I laugh at the title “I Need My Space!” only because of its failed attempt at clever humor and attempt at word play. Written by Cindy Long, an author of technology related works and education, Long overviews the pros and cons of popular networking sites, which several years ago was MySpace, but is now Facebook. In her article, Long focuses on a particular group of users of MySpace: teenage girls illustrating with “Caitlin”. On the side of the cons, Long regurgitates what many other s have already stated to be dangers: predatory stalkers that use information on social web pages that are not privatized to locate their victims, web pages of individuals that were not created by the said individual but another signifying the threat of identity theft (and perhaps humor). And as well as the measures MySpace has gone through in order to ensure safety and the privacy of its users such as hiding online status, location, age, etc. Stylistically, Long provides the cons first to inform the reader, but in turn provides the pros to show that they are stronger than the cons. The main pros being that social websites allow for creativity (ironically, facebook, the current largest social networking site only has one layout with colors blue and white) and will eventually be an important tool for valuable social connections that go beyond the category of only friends. I believe this analysis is correct, but the fact that Long exemplifies internet lingo as,”NAUSETGIRL (5:09:55): WOTZ ^? WNT 2 GO OUT? WARRIOR08 (5:09:56): yS, whr do wnt 2 go? NAUSETGIRL)5:09:57): How bout the chocl@ Sparrow n Olreans?” is an incredibly inaccurate and stupid representation of internet ling. It just simply isn’t that terrible. The abbreviations and unnecessary capitalizations with random symbols make reading it actually irritating to read. That is not the goal of internet jargon. The goal is to merely simplify and shorten the typing input but to have the outcome to be still readable; we want to save the fancy-shmancy for something like a formal essay and what-not. J
