Facebook: Social Network or Social Disaster

Facebook Social Network or Social Disaster Your busy day period is entere. You pointic home open up your laptop or head ein truthplace to your desktop and wrestle it on. After impatiently time lag for everything to hindrance on your computing machine you open up your web browser. You go to the top of the page and type in www. face and arrow down in the drop street corner to http//www. facebook. com/. As the website loads you wait in anticipation. When the soft bar at the top of the page loads you immediately research to the left hand corner of that bar.You glance everywhere the stolon video which is a silhouette of two enormous deal. Any comrade requests? You then crease everyplace to the next icon, a picture of two message bubbles. They propel you of the ones you would see in a cartoon. Any messages? You then proceed to sw on the wholeow your eyes over to the last icon, the world icon. Any Notifications? You fathom on these icons and with that click you begi n a complaisant interaction with someone. For m some(prenominal) mass, what I described above is an action they do everyday. Over 500 meg people worldwide live their lives on Facebook. (Fletcher and Ford, 32) After telling this ingeminate I asked myself one question, Is it the communication aspect of facebook that ca delectations everyone to be addicted to facebook or is there more to this addiction? I know I go on Facebook almost everyday without fail solely why? Do I go on to announce and persona Facebook as a social network or do I go on it mainly to get the dirt on others and what is going on in their lives?I came to the conclusion that Facebook is definitely a honorable place to glide by in communication with people, however, in some another(prenominal) itinerarys, Facebook has definitely been mis apply and do chew central. When you think approximately Facebook what is the first thing that comes to your mind? The first thing for me is friends. Right now I su ck up 933 friends on Facebook and friends argon a very important part of everyones lives. Facebook, like any other social network, gives you the ability to enunciate with friends, coworkers, family members, and people from totally over the world.You request to be their friend and wait for them to accept that request. There are so many people on Facebook today it would be sublime to turn next to the person that sits next to you in math curriculum and for them not to comport a Facebook account. It is a very loose way to get in contact with those whom you whitethorn not have seen in a while. Old friends that over the years have become acquaintances or even friends that you atomic number 50t talk to on a repair basis because they live in a completely distinguishable demesne then you.For many of my high school years I went on missions trips to Mexico to help out at an orphanage down there. I met many several(predicate) people and as the years went by I enumerateed earlier to seeing my long disjointed friends. Because of Facebook, I no longer have to call them my long lost friends because I can keep in contact with them through Facebook. I think it is great that so many of my friends are on Facebook and this is another way that I can communicate with them. However, one danger of having friends on Facebook is that some of the friends you accept may be quite superficial. Muise, Christofides, Desmarais, 442). I have almost a thousand friends on Facebook do you really think that I am as tightfitting to all of them as I am with my best friend? No, that is ridiculous. However, because Facebook is such an open social network and give us many divers(prenominal) ways to communicate with others it has a tendency to give us a more open look at life so people tend to share more intimate aspects on life over their facebook status. It has changed our social DNA, and made us more accustom to receptiveness (Fletcher and Ford, 33).When we share these intimate aspec ts we are not necessarily thinking, I take to everyone sees this. We are just thinking about the friends we usually interact with on facebook, but the problem is anyone that you have accepted as a friend can see that status change. For example, I am friends with my mother on Facebook and when I asked her what her favorite thing about Facebook was she replied, My favorite part about Facebook is that I can look on my kids profile and see what they have been up to. I got a similar response from a friend that said she likes Facebook because it keeps her in on the latest gossip. This is why we need to be careful when on facebook. Not everyones intent while on Facebook is to enhance communication. Some people use Facebook as their reduce for gossip and you never know who has this outlook while interacting over Facebook. Facebook offers many different ways to communicate with others. Status updates is just one of the many different services facebook offers. Status updates are a nice way to communicate what you are doing from a day to day asis or share bunco quotes that you found interesting. These status updates definitely help communication between people. some other service Facebook offers to communicate with others is the message service. If you want to have a underground conference with one or more people you can use the message service. This message service is somewhat like an email in the sense that you can send and receive messages that no one but the intended recipient can see. This is helpful if you want to plan a surprise party for some one and solitary(prenominal) want authorized people to know about it.This service is a very good way to have an intimate conversation with others, and I think that it is a very good service. However, many people dont use the message box as much as they should. This creates problems over Facebook. some other conversation method that is used on facebook is posting on others wall. The only problem with this is that ev eryone can see your wall. This can create many social mishaps. While social networks sites provide the opportunity to reunite with long lost friends, they also allow people to make their information public at bottom their circle of friends. (Muise, Christofides, Desmarais, 442) Anyone that is your friend can look at your wall posts and state into it wrong and become a huge rumor about you that ruins your reputation. It is that easy for a naive post on Facebook to be turned into a rumor and soon enough it will be all over your wall and all your friends will see it, making Facebook a center for gossip. That is why I believe if the wall posting service is used unwisely it can turn Facebook into a social disaster waiting to happen. Facebook makes it easy to see what is going on in everyone lives.It gives you notifications when anyone does something such as post on your wall or make a colour on your status or pictures. On your home page it gives you a play by play of what everyone o f your friends are doing over Facebook. It tells you when they are online so if you wanted to have a brief conversation with them you could just click on their picture icon and a little chat box will pop up. Also on the home page all your friends status changes will be listed on it and you can freely comment or like them whenever you would like.I think these notifications are very helpful ways to quickly send out a conversation to someone so you can keep up a alliance with someone even when our lives are hectic and we dont have time to sit down with them for coffee. However, Facebook is very addicting. Tynee Seno from the Philippines quotes, On average, I hap about four hours a day on Facebook- more time then I spend outside. (Facebook and You, 34) From personal experience, I can mistrust that Tynee is not just conversing with others over facebook for the whole four hours he is on Facebook everyday.When I spend an overwhelming amount of time on Facebook Im usually looking for an in. I dont know how many times I have take in something over Facebook and went immediately to my phone to text someone about what I had read over facebook. Did you see what she posted on his wall? And as simple as that, another gossip chain has begun. For many, it is not intentional to start this gossip chain. As humans, we are just very curious beings and sometime(prenominal) I even believe that jealousy can get involved. Facebook may expose an individual to potentially jealousy-provoking information. (Muise, Christofides, and Desmarais, 443) Like I said before, we dont do this on purpose. It is just in our human temperament to do this. However, I want to encourage you that next time you read something on Facebook that wasnt meant for you to read, instead of going and sharing it with the world, try to look past it. Just think how you would feel if you posted something without thinking who all would see your post and it ended up getting spread virtually in a nasty rumor. If we can annul this we can avoid making Facebook a place where simple socialization can turn into a disaster.So my advice is, next time you sit down at that computer and go straight to Facebook be careful because you wouldnt want a simple post to be the start of a social disaster. I think that overall Facebook has great potential in helping people communicate with others. It helps me communicate with people from Mexico by allowing me to be friends with whomever I want, as well as helping me keep in touch with people through its different venues for communicating with people. I think that Facebook is a great social network, however, I believe that it can be made into a social disaster if it were to be misused.Works Cited Facebook and You. (Cover story). Time 175. 21 (2010) 34-35. Academic await Premier. EBSCO. Web. 2 Nov. 2010. Fletcher, Dan, and Andrea Ford. Friends Without Borders. (Cover story). Time 175. 21 . (2010) 32-38. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 2 Nov. 2010. Muise, Amy, Emily Christofides, and Serge Desmarais. more Information than You Ever Wanted Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed heller of Jealousy?. CyberPsychology & Behavior 12. 4 (2009) 441-444. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 2 Nov. 2010