During my time in Writing 101S I have completed three writing assignments, but my most challenging and interesting assignment was my research paper, The Impact of Social Networking on Privacy. At first my topic was to general, impacts of technology on privacy, but with my instructor’s feedback, I was able to narrow doing to a specific type of technology. The information I had found using the UMUC Library and Google was valid with a substantial amount of evidence to support my paper. My research paper was successful due to the amount of time and effort that I put into collecting the information, along with the lessons provided through the class. The information given to me through the course content along with the hyperlinked videos was key reasons why my research paper was successful. I chose the impact of social networking on privacy because I thought it was an interesting topic that would address a large audience in our newer technological world. I was curious on how much privacy I had on social media sites and how much risk I was in potentially, along with others. Many people are on social media sites and this research paper would be interesting to almost everyone, even people who are not users who know someone who is. I wanted to do a research paper that many people would be interested in and benefit from. Many people don’t know the risks behind social media so I wanted to inform people of the severity. Facebook has turned into our society’s technology drug, and I wanted to bring people back to reality and have more self-awareness. Some issues I had with the research were there was not enough research on the topic. With Social media still being fairly new a lot of the research was just with in the last few years, which limited me to a small amount of data. Another problem that I had run into is the internet changes daily, privacy statements update frequently, and security measures to attempt to protect people are being updated hourly. With so much change in social media sites to try to improve privacy, it makes it a lot harder to research information. I wanted to focus on something unique that would be challenging. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and learn something from my research, I succeeded. While searching information for my research paper I found some interesting articles with a lot of useful information. I began at the UMUC Library, knowing I had to use a certain amount of Scholarly Journals; this was the best place to start. My initial search was an advanced search with Boolean search mode and scholarly journals, with the key words technology, effects, and social media. With this search I came up with 1,277 results, which was too many for me to go through. I started added “or” words to my search like privacy, Facebook, and disclosure. These other key words reduced the amount of journals and allowed me to start my research with a comfortable amount of results. As a began to read through the article I started understanding more and more about my topic and exactly what I wanted to do. I found three great journals to assist me with my paper “Can the Media Richness of a Privacy Disclosure Enhance Outcome?” (By Aljukhadar, M., Senecal, S., & Ouellette, D), “Too Many Facebook 'Friends'? Content Sharing and Sociability Versus the Need for Privacy in Social Network Sites” (By Brandtzæg, P., Luders, M., & Skjetne, J.), and “An Empirical Investigation of Privacy Awareness and Concerns on Social Networking Sites” (By Hazari, S., & Brown, C.). I started taking notes and looking for articles that related to my subject. After looking through the journals, I wanted to branch out a little to Google. I began browsing the google search engine for articles related to privacy risks with social media. I came across articles from the New York Times, Technology review, and HUB International, which gave me the exact information on privacy risks I was looking for. I then proceeded to use in
