Internet use and interpersonal trust on facebook

Abstract

The history of online chatting goes some years back around 1978. In 1988 Jarkko Oikarinen from University of Oulu in Finland developed an online platform called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The scope for this platform was mostly to allow people to communicate and discus any software issues, news or any other issues. Through the years IRC was growing and becoming more popular than ever and more people were online (Davies, 2014). Nowadays everything is growing and for the last years Social Medias have become more powerful than ever among peoples everyday life. Social networking sites also go back several years when they first started was from 1969 and until today more sites are being developing regarding people’s needs. The 85% of the 7.1 billion people worldwide are using the Internet whereby several listed countries are connected to Social Media Sites (Curtis, 2013). Due to this expansion physical harassment and bulling is now being electronically as well (Gumbus, 2013). The below research is mostly focusing on Facebook and the crime around it, it will examine how and with what methods these people can gain children trust. The target audience for this research is children between 12 to 15 years old since this target is not easy to understand how serious this issue could be. Unfortunately our country lacks of information and education on this subjects. From the research we will see that none of our target audience is affected from this issue. This might occur because we are a small country and if there is such a case is not always going to be on the news. Though we had some incidence of online harassment, mostly from older people to harass young children, it seems that it not become something important to people ears. This is also analyzed in the research since a part of my participants where the parents and it seems that only the half of them respond and some of them did not care if they will going to do anything to the school in order to educate the children. Since there is lack of education and information to the children it leads them to be easily become victims of online harassment. Parents believe that their children are safe on the Internet, but they are not. From the results we saw that a big amount of students not only are logged in mostly everyday but also they using their mobile device to log in (which cannot be controlled by parents) and they have over 200 Facebook friends online. This leads us to see in general that children are not aware of the dangers, and they tend to add more people on their profiles. Needs to be mention that Facebook has now a new functionality which shows you people you may know. These users that Facebook is using are friends that the rest of your Facebook friends have and it gives you some choices to add them if you like. This is a disadvantage for Facebook since they keep adding people and some of those might be a fake profile and lead them to the crime. The scope of the research is to show how addicted children are on Facebook, the reason for this and also to see whether parents are aware or not. The reason of having a sociologist to interview was because she is having some seminars mostly on bullying and how all this had started. Parents and students should be informed and well educated regarding social media, the dangers and how you can have a safe profile without leading yourself to be a future victim.