Facebook makes it easier to track others
Monday, October 19th, 2009
By: Elizabeth Fiedler
efiedler@whyy.org
A Philadelphia woman and her long-lost sister who reunited via Facebook, have some wondering how social networking sites change relationships and re-connections.
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Drexel University Sociology Professor Robert Stokes says some re-connections made on the internet are deeply meaningful, and other re-connections, like a junior high school classmate who looked him up on Facebook, are not as important.
Stokes: Obviously for this woman to find her sister prior to virtual networks on social sites would have required a lot more work. But people did still do that, right. People still looked up long-lost adoptive parents or adoptive kids but it usually required them to go through a series of bureaucratic entites to do it and a lot of those bureaucratic entities weren't too happy to facilitate that.
Some are glad it's easier to track people down with the click of a button.
But Stokes says in other cases, like adoption, people are not always glad to be "found."