Sunday, November 13, 2011

Scholarly Article

             I found an article called “Cyberbullying: The New Era of Bullying” written by Ann Wade and Tanya Beran. I found this article on the TAMU library article database by searching “cyberbullying”. I clicked on the link that took me to the full text and there was a yellow sticky note that confirmed it was academic/ scholarly. I also knew it was scholarly because the article was in the Canadian Journal of School Psychology. The authors were both professors at the University of Calgary.
            The article is about cyberbullying and different factors of cyberbullying such as prevalence, sex and age. The authors conducted research and their findings were quite interesting. The first main point was about the prevalence of cyberbullying. The authors found according to many studies 11%-17% of students have cyberbullied someone and about 19%-29% of students have been cyberbullied. The second main point was the authors wanted to see if girls or boys were being bullied more and at what rates. Some of their research indicated that boys were more likely to be the bully and get bullied than girls. The last main point the authors looked at was the age. They found the perpetration of cyberbullying increased with age but the students of all ages were victims.
The conclusions that the authors made indicated that there should be more research done in the future to find if there is a more substantial effect of cyberbullying among boys and girls and students of different grades. The authors also believe there should be national study that targets adolescents to determine more about cyberbullying as a whole.  I think the authors did a successful job of relaying a rhetorical message by using logos. They used statistics and research to show that cyberbullying is in fact a problem and society needs to work on it as a whole.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Online Dating...Safe?

            With the constant playing of the Match.com and eHarmony commercials, I began to think about how unsafe online dating truly is. This is not something that normally comes to mind when you think about internet safety but I think it completely fits under this category. Although you may eventually meet the person you are matched with in person, most of the dating occurs online. This reality is quite scary.
            How does anyone know that the person they are talking to is actually who they say they are or even what they actually look like? The commercials use sweet love stories of how two people meet online in order to appeal to pathos and get the viewers interested in their effective way to find a soul mate. Many people who are looking for love are persuaded and sign up for these online dating websites. A lot of information about themselves such as where they are from, likes, dislikes, kids, and pictures is then easily accessible for anyone on these websites. This becomes a problem because many people are too open online and give predators free reign with their information.
            I feel like these online dating websites are a lot like social networks and people need to be cautious when putting information about themselves online. I think online dating does not really give the people involved a fair chance to get to know one another. I also think it creates more problems than good because of risks associated with giving out information to complete strangers via the internet. Are there ways to make online dating safer? What are your thoughts on online dating?