Educating Social Networking Users |
<i>“Privacy is dead, and social media hold the smoking gun.” – Pete Cashmore, Mashable CEO
Nair P, Papadaki M
“Social networks aren’t about Web sites. They’re about experiences.” – Mike DiLorenzo, NHL social media marketing director.</i>
Since the turn of the 21st century, there have been many developments in the technological world, developments and findings that may not have necessarily improved the way the world lives, but definitely have changed and revolutionised the way it works . The Internet itself has changed so much from being a service designed for CERN scientists to communicate amongst themselves to a global phenomenon (Anderson, 2007). And now with the rise of Web 2.0 or simply a second much better version of the Web, people are getting more and more dependent on the Web for everything that they do. The participatory nature of Web 2.0 along with its user friendly design and outlook meant that it became an endless repository of dynamic information and information exchange into which anybody can both add to as well as take from (Sharma, 2011). Many services like blogging, interactive and target centric advertisements and product placements, e-commerce soon started to blossom due to the advent of Web 2.0 however none of them could profit as much as social networking sites did during the last half a decade.
In this project an effort will be made to educate users about the potential threats involved on social networking sites by creating a Flash based game designed in the format of a quiz. The users will be put in make believe situations where they will have to answer questions based on their existing knowledge of social networking sites and its functionalities. The users through the game will also be made aware of additional facts that can further help their security measures against the threats on social networking sites. The game will be sent to a selected group of participants and the results will be collected for analysis purpose. The results will be studied in depth to evaluate the success of the game and whether creating awareness by using interactive medium is a good choice over other means like designing posters, making videos, lectures, seminars etc. Based on some of the scenarios a few solutions and changes will be suggested to the already existing precautions and measures. The results of the game shows there is a scope for more user responsibility in creating awareness and users are open to similar awareness based initiatives instead of the tried and testing ones like video and seminars. Users were also seen to better react to situations if they were able to co-relate it with similar situations.