December PFD topic: We will use this topic at Okoboji and George Mason only. Lincoln historically runs the January topic in preparation for the IHSSA tournament in early January.
Resolved: That, on balance, social networking Web sites have a positive impact on the United States.
This is an odd topic, that on first glance, could be worse to debate than the NBA Dress code topic a couple of years ago. However there is some balance in this topic. 57M use My Space; 22m use Facebook; 33m use blogger; 12 million use World Press and 11 million us Typepad for networking and blogs.
Business claim a productivity increase when they allow internal use of social networks; political campaigns claim social networking works; FBI, DHS, Colleges, Employers all use networks to weed out unwanted candidates; networks forced a new OnLine Sexual Predators Law; sites were designed to sell advertising which hasn't been huge; and there are all sorts of potential security issues with social network sites. Also on the con is the data collection activities of sites.
Teenagers love the instant communication with friends. Unfortunately the amount of abuse on the networks by teens is pretty high. Teenagers tend to say and threaten things they would never do in person to someone. So this is a fair debate topic.
