Using New Communication Technologies to communicate with friends and families.

The only form of New Communication Technologies which I use to keep in contact with my family would be the telephone. This is mainly what I use for communicating with my elder relatives, being my grandparents and my great grandparents as they are apart of that age group that are not up to date with using new communication technologies, however in saying this my grandpa has recently been given a laptop from his work and is now mastering how to use e-mail. To communicate with younger family members such as my Mum, Auntie and Cousins, we use our mobile phones, often with my Mum I will call her when I need to communicate with her but with others I just send an SMS.
I mainly use New Communication Technologies to communicate with my friends. Since I have just moved from Sydney, I find it really hard to communicate with my friends without the Internet. We keep in contact via MySpace, I honestly don't know if I would have any contact with them without MySpace. MySpace allows me to post photos of what I am doing up here on the Gold Coast, this allows them to see my new friends and see the places that I go out and visit, of course it also allows me to see what they have been up to since I have been gone! MySpace allows us to send private messages or comments which is a quick way to ask how my friends are going and if anything new is going on with them! I also sometimes use SMS to keep in contact, if i have some sudden news I want to share I just write an SMS and send it to all of my close friends! Also its great to send a quick picture of something, for example my good friend Alice got engaged and she sent me a PXT of her engagement ring! Also with MySpace, it has enabled me to make a good friend Katrine who I have never met before but still talk to a lot through both MySpace and Facebook and i still consider her a very good friend of mine. These two networks also allow me to keep in contact with a good friend Greg who lives in America who I met when he did an exchange. The next thing for me is communicating with my friends up here on the Gold Coast, I often just use SMS but sometimes its just easier to give my friends a quick call, I do find that I go through WAY too much credit! Thank God for Vodafone's $29 Cap. Also I find that in comparison to my friends in Sydney, my friends here on the Gold Coast tend to use Facebook rather than MySpace, I think this is a regional thing as most of my friends here are European or American and tend to use Facebook. In using MySpace and Facebook there are some privacy issues, for example the photos which I post are only for my friends to view and until recently on MySpace, they could be viewed by anyone with a MySpace account, that there is where my only issue arises. Both MySpace and Facebook profiles can be kept private but it wasn't until last weeks New Communication Technologies class that I was concerned with putting MySpace on private. In the class, the issues were addressed of people placing things on their MySpace for anyone to see and this is not always a safe thing to do, and during that week I set my profile to private.

As read, I make use of many different New Communication Technologies. Things such as mobile phones I have used since I was around 12 years old, I mainly got one when I was starting high school as I would meet lots of people and it was also a thing about fitting in. I started using computers when I was very young, around 7 years old as my Mum owned one and in primary school they were starting to teach us how to use them. Networks such as MySpace and Facebook I have been using for around 2 years, I joined them as I saw others using them and they seemed to enjoy them a lot.

Overall, New Communication Technologies are a big part of my life and without them I would not be able to have as much social contact with my friends and family as i do now.