Conclusion

At the beginning of my research, I was completely lost and did not know what to do. All I knew was Google and the Internet .I did not know have to look for other resources. Even if I did, I would not know how to distinguish between reliable resources and unreliable ones. When I first searched for books, I was not expecting to find much information because our topic is very recent. However, I was not disappointed when I went to the library. I found some interesting books. It is true that they are somehow general about the topic because they are not very detailed about the subject, but there are some interesting points on them that can make a good introduction for a research paper. After that, we moved on to journal articles. I was impressed by the large number of academic journals that the university's databases have. There were thousands of results for our topic. The thing I liked with jounals was that they were more up to date than books and they were also more detailed. Most of the time, they focus of a certain point. Therefore, they give you the maximum amount of information about that point. This way, when you combine several journal articles, you would find that you actually talked about different points in your research paper. Then I had to do research on the internet for websites and internet sources. This one was the most difficult for me because even though I found a lot of information and websites and the topic, the difficulty is to make sure they are reliable enough to be cited in my research paper. In order to do so, I had to first see which kind of website it was. According to the evaluating sheet sent by our professor : http://www.taftcollege.edu/newTC/Academic/INCO48/sec6-4.htm

Domain Type	What it Means
.com	a commercial business, organization, or company
.edu	an educational institution
.int	an international organization
.gov	a nonmilitary government entity
.mil	a military organization
.net	other organizations: nonprofit, nonacademic
.uk, .au, ca, jp, etc.	country codes denoting servers found in other countries

Then I had to look for the "10 C's" which are the criteria for evaluating internet resources: content, credibility, critical thinking, copyright, citation, continuity, censorship, connectivity, comparability, context.

Finally, from all the sources I found, it seems that the answer to our thesis statement which is "does the lack of privacy in social networks increase stalking" is yes. Privacy policies in social networks still need to be strenghtened. There are so many people one does not know who can know things about him and his/her personal life, his/her political and religiours views, his/her hobbies, his/her education & job, etc. Therefore, one should be very aware and careful while posting and adding new information about oneself.

Evaluating Internet Sources

The risk of using internet sources for a research paper is the lack of accuracy. There are so many websites about the topic and everyone can create one based on his/her personal perspectives and ideas. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the right from the wrong. When I first entered my topic in google, which is the social networks' privacy and its effect on stalking, there were millions of results. It only made things even more complicated. I run through the first ones that had interesting titles. However, this was not as interesting as it may seem for some of them. For example, there is this one: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-social-networks-bring . It is like a forum where someone stated his opinion and the others answered him. There was this controversy and those people were anonymous, which made the website innaccurate for a research paper.

Fortynately, I could find one interesting webside from a very accurate source, which is the office of the privacy commissioner in Canada: http://www.priv.gc.ca/information/social/index_e.cfm. In this website, there is an 'about us' section that presents the authors and what they do. There is also a 'contact us' section where there are phone numbers and addresses. According to the date at the bottom of each page of the website, it seems that it is regularly modified and updated. In addition to that, it is related to my topic because it discusses privacy issues in social networks. To sum up, the website seems to have most of the "10 C's" criteria in identifying a reliable website.

Reading and Evaluating an Academic Journal..

When it came to searching for academic journals, I was kind of more confident than for books. Academic journals are more updated and more recent, so they deal with the subject with an even more recent perspective. When I entered my research topic in EBSCO database, I was not disappointed. There were so many journals about it. The difficulty was then to chose some of them that seemed the most related to the topic. I looked at the titles and then at the publishers. Finally, I found a journal that seemed very interesting:

Levin A, Abril P. Two Notions of Privacy Online. Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law [serial online]. Summer2009 2009;11(4):1001-1051. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed March 8, 2011.

 ===> http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=43729511&site=ehost-live 

It is a an article of a scholarly journal published by Vanderbilt University Law School  and that article was written by :      
        Levin, Avner : Associate Professor, Chair, Law & Business Department, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University
      Abril, Patricia Sanchez : Assistant Professor in Business Law, University of Miami School of Business Administration. B.A., Duke University, 1996; J.D., Harvard Law School, 2000

      They are both professors of law and business in different american universities. Therefore, they have a great experience in terms of law, which is closely related to our research topic that deals with privacy in social networks. It is a very recent article that was published in 2009, so I will use it for current information.It was published in a university journal, so I guess the intended audience is mainly students and educators. It is written in a simple way, so it may also be addressed to the general public. It seems that the main purpose of the text is to inform. Since it was published by a university journal, I think that the intended audience is mainly students and educators. However, it is written in a way that is kind of simple, so general public might be intended as well. Now that I have assessed the source in more detail, I still think it is useful because it deals with my research topic. What I like about this one compared to the book I found last time is that the journal is more up to date and more recent. Therefore, there is more information about the subject of social networks ( with a focus on Facebook) and their effects on privacy. It is also written by high authorities in terms of law and business, so they must have done a lot of research about that subject and rely on their wide knowledge and experience before coming up with that article.

Another Mission is Accomplished ==> Another Step has been Done :D

The first picture is taken from : http://www.brisbanesde.eq.edu.au/?library/elec_db

Searching for Books and Evaluating them..

 

The thing that worried me the most about that topic is that it is recent. I was afraid of not finding any interresting book about it. However, I gave it a try and I logged in to see the library catalog. I was thinking that it was impossible that such a huge library with so many new articles and books every semester does not contain a book about our reasearch topic. I entered the key word and several titles appeared. Most of them were not really related to the topic, but I wrote down the call number of two or three of them. After that, I went to the library to have a more specific idea about those books.

When I finally located them, I cannot express how happy and surprised I was when I found so many other books dealing with that subject.There were three full shelves of so many books! But then, I realised that I could not take all of those with me. I only have the right to take 6 books maximum. How am I supposed to choose between so many interesting books ? I decided to do the first selection according to the title, so I looked for titles that seemed to me the closest to my research topic. But still, there was too many of them and could not read all of them. Therefore, I decided to look at the table of content and to stop searching if I found what I was looking for. This way, I was only left with 5 of them, then I chose 3 of the 5 to check them out. There was one that seemed to be the most interesting.

It was Dhillon, gurpreet. Social Responsibility in the Information Age: Issues and Controversies. Idea group, 2002. The author is an MIS professor at the University of Nevada. He is an authority in the subject because he conducted a lot of research and he earned degrees in the Management Information System Field. There was also another 22 authors that collaborated with him. The book was published by 'Idea Group' which is a commercial publisher. However, I do not this that the author's affiliation with the publisher biased their work because it is an independent and private publisher company that is not related to the subject the author is talking about. Since the book was published in 2002, it discusses the idea of Information Age from a recent perspective. Therefore, I can use it for current information context. The intended audience are all people interested in the subject. However, I think it is written for someone with little knowledge about the subject rather than for an expert because according to the table of contents, it goes step by step in defining the subject. I think the purpose of this book is to inform the interrested audiences about the social responsibility we have in this new age. I think so because it is stating facts that are true and people can test that. The authors gathered the information from other authors' books. There is a bibliography at the end of evert chapter. It is important to know the author's sources because they give us an idea about the author's reliability. According to all of the above, I still think this book is useful for my research because it deals with the subject of my research. The chapters I think I will use are mainly chapter 6: priacy andd the Internet and chapter 5: internet privacy: Interpreting Key issues. I think those are the most related chapters to my research .

First mission accomplished, the rest is to come ;)

Blog Introduction: Why Social Networks & Privacy?

As a thesis statement for our blog, we chose the following question: does the lack of privacy in social networks lead to increased stalking?

This topic was not my number one priority. However, I gave it some more thoughts and I actually found it intereseting for several reasons. For instance, I am frequently using the Facebook social network; therefore, I would really appreciate to know how my privacy can be threatened by using those kinds of networks. I would also like to prevent other people and friends of mine who are using social networks from the different threats if there are any. The reason why I first hesitated is the fact that social networking is a very recent phenomenon, so there may not be many books and researches done about it yet. I hope it will not be the case, or at least that we will find a solution to overcome that challenge :)