The positive social benefits of social networking are that you can keep in contact with the people you meet and with friends and family in another country. You can talk to people you knew at school, college and university and you can look at what they are doing in their lives at the moment, and see what they’ve been up tp. Also you can organize things for you company like for example a fundraiser and you can inform all your friends and family about it so it encourages them to join in on your event.
The negatives of social networking are that the whole network can take over your social life, it can take over what you do and how you do it, people can sit up on Facebook for hours, the problem is that these people are not using their socializing skills which means they’re not interacting with real people, so the younger generation aren’t learning the correct social skills they need in the real world.
Social Networking is changing our relationships quite a lot; it’s causing the younger generation to talk to their already existing friends, but in that process they are making new friends and talking to them, some times young teens go on websites such as ‘Tagged’ and ‘Bebo’, they make friends and they build a strong relationship with these people, and call them their friends, but in reality they don’t know who they really are. They some times say that they are in a serious relationship and become partners, still having never met them. These people could be 50-year-old paedophiles grooming young children over the Internet, things like this also happen on sites like ‘Omeale’ and ‘Chatroulette’.
A lot of people can impersonate other people and lie about there true identity. For people to say they are friends or in a relationship with someone they never met is very strange because before social networking came around young teens actually went out to parties, to the cinema, bowling, having sleepovers and meeting friends that way; also for adults there is ‘Match.com’ where you can date people from the internet, its really unsafe because again people could be lying about their true Identities.
The Internet gives us instant access to almost all information, which affects our ability to process it; we have an information overload. Too much information is fed to us, which can cause us to be too reliant on the on the information given to us, which could be completely untrue, but because we read so much of it and process as it being true we believe what’s written down. We stray away from books because we feel that they’re too hard for us to read. People dislike reading them because we have to find out where it all is, unlike when we look it up on the net it takes too clicks, we find it easier because there’s not as much work involved.
I think that Facebook has the most impact on my life today, because it connects me with all my family in America and in different parts of England, and with my friends that I have met throughout my life, it helps me to share information with all of them, showing them what I’ve done and where I’ve been. If Facebook didn’t exist, I would have to manually find out where they lived and write letters to them, which would be difficult because there are so many people I have met and it would take up a lot of time. I probably would only talk to the people I knew lived near me, and I wouldn’t have as many friends as I do.
I think that the future of Social networking will be that most people’s lives will be on social networking sites; more and more generations will begin to use the sites to talk to friends and family, and stay connected with the world around them. This could cause people to lose certain socializing skill needed for the real world; it could damage their future because they wouldn’t have the skills to get a job. In South Korea, they have the worst numbers of people using the internet, people can spent up to 18 hours a day on the internet; so people have been admitted to hospital and prescribed medication because of their excessive use of the internet. There have been cases of people who have had bad anxiety when not near a computer; I think that I could corrupt people’s minds. It might also cause people to think that they need to use the Internet; when they don’t.