Social Networking The Good & The Bad

Social Networking has been the rage of the new millennium. Ever since the introduction of MySpace, society has been hooked on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. But why is it that we connect to them so frequently and spend so much time on them?

Social Networks have added a new dynamic to all of our lives. They have given us a new, more efficient, and extremely captivating way to interact with our friends and family. As the article Brave New World of Digital Intimacy by Clive Thompson states, Facebook has introduced a new way to interact. When you visit someone’s Facebook page it is like peeking into their room without directly talking them. You can see pictures of the, a bio, and personal information such as their relationship status and current location. You can very easily connect with many people on a very intimate level with a very small amount of effort.

But have social networks really been beneficial to society as a whole.  What I believe, and Judith Donath, an associate professor at MIT, precisely outlined in the article is MySpace Good for Society? , there is a good and a dark side. The good of course is the decreased amount of effort required to communicate with the people we care about.  As of recent in society with the emergence of new technologies such as smart phones, people have increased the amount of multi-tasking they do on a daily bases. But there is a dark side. The dark side being that they devalue the meaning of words like friend. We now take terms like this for granted and are disconnected from the traditional qualities of friendship such as trust and reliability. There also is a really bad for teens. Social Networking sites now become the medium for public humiliation and bullying. Individuals are now subject to cyber bullying, which unlike traditional bullying, has much more longer-lasting implications.

In hindsight, we need to take social networking with a grain of salt. They give us many benefits such as constant contact with people we care about and entertainment in the form of games, but they also have a dark side. Many people are concerned with privacy issues and how much information Facebook has gained on their users. But we all must remember even though Facebook is a free service they are a business and have to gain their revenues from somewhere.  The question is are you willing to sacrifice some of your private information to businesses for Farmville and tweeting? Time will tell.