Since the creation of social networking sites, millions of people have handed over their information in order to sing up to become part of the online community. These sites have never been exclusive to certain people, however when they first started, being able to connect to the internet provided the problem for people to join.
For me, at this time, one of the best things about social networking is that almost everyone you know will be on one of these sites, and due to this, it makes it easier to organise events, get in contact, spread news to loads of people simultaneously, and to just see how people are. In addition to this any old friends you want to get in touch with will most likely be found on one of these sites. Furthermore they've now become great places to advertise home grown businesses or products that as an individual you've made and want to sell.
Looking at the shear amount of people that are active on these sites, It would now be very easy to say that Facebook and other sites of its kind have become a part of peoples way of life, I've even heard it put that young people now are a generation of information dependent people, due to these sites. We have, I think, become a society that does like to know what things are happening, and what people are getting up to, because you then feel more connected. However with that said, this is where I feel the bad side of social networking comes into play.
Due to it now being very easy in everyday life to be able to gain access to the internet, people have become in a way addicted to these sites, and spend far more time on them then perhaps people suggest they should. I will hold my hands up to this and say that I did for a brief while go through a phase spending agess on facebook, updating my status several times a day, checking my wall, going on games, but I luckily now that phase has passed and I have it under control.
When thinking about what kind of people use these sites and the amount of people that use them, I realised that there has been an increasing number of younger people signing up to these sites even though there are age restriction. When I was at secondary school, friends of mine would have younger siblings who had accounts, who obviously must have lied about how old they were when signing up. It does worry me that it is literally as easy as writing down any year and saying that's when you were born, just to be able to get an account.
Would people say that social networking has become addictive, and that perhaps it is enticing younger people who shouldn't be on it to lie in order to join. Or does the good that they offer, and all the features we now have access to, out way any downfalls that they may have?
I never thought at the start of writing this blog that I would come to some sort of conclusion about these social networking sites. They've been around for quite a few years now, they're well established, and I don't think they'll be going anywhere anytime soon. I just wanted to be able to note a few things down about them, look at both the pros and cons for them, and so hopefully in however many years, will be able to see have they've changed and how they fit into the world then.
Myspace was one of the first of these sites to appear, at its peak it was very popular and had loads of people signed up to it. But now, after a very short space of time, it seems to have disappeared from our screens, with little chance of returning.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
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