Module II

1.) What is [are] identified as the primary reason(s) for utilizing such sites?

First, social sites have become hugely popular over the past five years. We have been introduced to social sites such as Reunion.com and Bebo.com. But the social site that is amongst the must used and popular is Facebook and Myspace. Facebook, a social networking site launched is 2004, was created as a “social utility to connect people with friends and others who work, study, and live around them (Facebook.com)”. Myspace is described as “a place where you can create a profile page that you can use to meet new friends (myyspace.com)”.
Additionally, both social utilities however, are used for very different reasons amongst males and females. According to Raacke, the use of these sites differs amongst gender.
Research has shown that online communication fosters relationship building, improving communication between parties, and consistently documents both sex and generational differences in online communication. For example, women are more likely to engage in online communication to maintain personal connections with family, friends, and coworkers, whereas men use online communication for pursuing sexual interests and romance (Raake, pp. 169)
As stated prior, while females find Facebook as a place to rekindle old friendships, or find old classmates, males focus on quite the contrary. Males use such sites as a means to establish friendships that may possibly result in some type of sexual relationship in the future. While researches to further prove this theory is somewhat scare, the content in which males utilize such social networking sites is vastly different than the content of communications that females utilize.
Furthermore, when males contact a female on either site, there is usually a use of sexual connotation—such, “hey sexy, how are you doing tonight?” Females’ communications on both sites are different in context. I discovered this by searching through public profiles on both social networking sites. I did use search criteria that was bas upon age, locality, gender, what relationships they are looking for, etc. After going through some public profiles on both Myspace and Facebook, I found that a number of men were contacting women whom they did not know, but had some type of interest in knowing. Women, on the other hand, contacted women who they perhaps knew from the work place or an academic institution.
Also, the gratification theory plays a major role in the popularity and use of these social networking sites. The gratification theory is the basic theme of uses and gratifications is the idea that people use the media to get specific gratifications. The main idea of the Uses and Gratifications model is that people are not helpless victims of all powerful media, but use media to fulfill their various needs. These needs serve as motivations for using media.
Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz devised their uses and gratifications model in 1974 to highlight five areas of gratification in media texts for audiences. These include:
1. Escape — Some media texts allow the user to escape from reality. For example, video games.
2. Social interaction — People create personal relationships with the characters in a media text. Potentially this could become dangerous if people do not question the reality of such texts. It also creates a common ground for conversation in people's every day lives.
3. Identify — People often identify a part of themselves in a media text, either through character or circumstance. For example, hair style trends stemming from a magazine feature. This can go a long way in people's ideologies.
4. Inform and educate — the audience gain an understanding of the world around them by consuming a media text, for example print and broadcast news.
5. Entertain - consumed purely for entertainment purposes, meaning that text need not have any other gratifications (The Uses of Mass Communication, 1974).
The Theory of Gratification allows us to utilize a physiological evaluation of people fascination with different forms of media. This theory gives explanation and insight into why these sites are so popular. Many students utilize these sites as a pure form of “entertainment”. Other students solely use such sites to escape from reality. On these sites, profiles can be created based on pure fantasy. Many people create profiles that purely based upon the perception of what they want to be. Many of the profiles are both sites are said to be untrue in one form or another in profile content. These ties into the first notion of the gratification theory “escape”. An individual may not be totally satisfied with his/her current existence, so they will find a method to escape from such by living vicariously as a different person on the internet.
In conclusion, there could be a world of different reasons why people utilize social networking platforms. It can not be ignored that these sites are a social are a excellent source of networking. However, while these networks are a great way to utilize, build, and gain new social skills, it must be used with a great deal of discretion. Myspace has been the target of several news reports. Myspace as well as other social websites can be quite dangerous to the unsuspecting. While some use these sights for entertainment, other use these sights to prey on individuals.

The trends & factors of Depression Amongst First Time African-American Parents

First, based upon the three assigned scholarly journals, depression was identified as a highly prevalent within the African-American community. The factors that were stated to attribute to these findings are families that fall within the low-income earning bracket, the initial transition to parenthood, living arraignments for toddlers with the first three to four months of life, child rearing, and lowly educated parents found in the African-American community.
Next, low-income earnings and poorly educated parents were found to be contributing factors to depressive symptoms for African-American families. According to Cooper, “traditional sociodemographic risk factoid for depression—having young children, inner city residence, low-income, and low education, for example—are ubiquitous among poor mothers, and depression frequently remains undetected or inadequately treated in this group (Cooper et al, 2003)”.
Additionally, the transition into parenthood is also considered to be a major contributing factor to depression for first time African-American parents. According to Cowan and Cowan, “becoming a parent is considered one of the most demanding and stressful life transitions in an individual will face, often giving rise to symptoms of depression (Cowan & Cowan, 2006)”. This phenomenon is further warranted by The National Institute of Mental Health. According to this institution, “50-80% of women experience postpartum blues, sadness, anger, or anxiety after giving birth that can last for months (National Institute of Mental Health, 2005)”. What is more distressing is the findings of a study conducted by Matthey, Barnett, Ungerer, and Waters. According to their studies, the authors uncovered two startling trends. The first trend was that “physiological distress across the transition to parenthood has the potential to impair the individual while presenting additional risk to the individual’s partner and their relationship, parenting behaviors, and child outcomes”.
Additionally, the same authors also found that preexisting factors are also present for individuals whom find themselves at risk of depression. According to Perren, von Wyl, Burgin, Simoni, & von Klitzing, “among the risk factors for post partum depressive symptoms are preexisting levels of distress, a low level of spousal support (O’hara & Swain, 1996: Simpson, Rhodes, Campbell, Tran & Wilson, 2003), relationship dissatisfaction, infant temperament (Maxted et al., 2005), stressful life events, and personality (i.e. neuroticism; Matthey et al., 2000).

The article on the gender differences in social portraits reflected in my space profile was interesting. It provided a lot of significant statistics that describe the social tools of cyberspace. My space provides a place for people to socialize with others. It is obvious that women mention having a significant other well more than males appear to do on their social profiles. The need for women to mention their mates is obviously clear with the statistics that were gathered and compared. You would think that we as women were passed the need for apparent reassurance or need to be defined by our relationships.

The article included a lot of statistics but it was a lot of data to take in. The most distinctive gender differences were the number of times the significant other was mentioned in the “About Me” section and how many times they were mentioned in the “Interests” sections. Males were less apt to mention their significant other in the “About Me” section than women. I believe that because my space is such a social chat room that males tend not to mention their significant other as much due to attempting to meet other women through my space.

I do feel that a women’s career, family and personal relationships are all connected due to the continuous juggling of all aspects of her life unlike majority of men whom separate work and family. It’s hard to retain one sense of self or individuality when everything is dependent on you in order to keep going. How can you separate or disconnect yourself from your current juggling act? If they have more statistics regarding that information please let me know.

The study did state that some of the statistics were based on a young group of men and women. Majority of men at that age don’t have the responsibility of an older settled male which includes over the age of 30. Some more extensive studies that include older males as well as younger might reveal different results especially being able to separate work , family and personal relationships. Even though, the majority of individuals on my space are a younger group of people generally under 30.
It is also a stigmatism for women to not have someone in their life. The idea of falling in love and being in a relationship is what you are supposed to do. So you are conditioned to make that as much a priority as any other aspect of your life or there is considered something wrong with you. Men on the other hand consider that as something that you do compared to being a part of who you are. The statistics was insightful and I would like to see further studies in this area because I have quite a few statistics gathered on my own in this area of comparing male tendencies and female tendencies. I also have more conclusions as to why women mention their significant others more than men do for a variety of reasons