At my current age of 22, I find myself spending a large majority of the time I spend on my laptop on Facebook.com. It’s a scary realization, but at the age of 18, when I first got my Facebook, I can remember coming to the same conclusion just months after I had made a profile with the website. The average person between the ages of 18 and 25 will most likely say the same thing, and this age gap is continuing to expand as more adults hop on the social-networking bandwagon. Throughout my five years on “the book”, the website has undergone some thorough changes. Despite constant little tweaks to its appearance and layout, the most vital changes have been made to the amount of privacy a Facebook user has, or basically does not have anymore. A term often associated with Facebook nowadays is the verb “creeping”. Used in a sentence, “I was creeping on Facebook….” A word with such negative connotations used to describe something that most 18-25 years olds do multiple times a day just does not seem right to me, but it has become a new normal in our society. Unfortunately, Facebook is all about being creepy now. It allows us to know everything about everyone we are friends with in the virtual world, whether we want to know or not. The feeling of being a creep is inevitable when you find yourself on someone’s Facebook page, whether your friends in real life or just in the virtual world, and you accidently find yourself knowing the last five people that person has become friends with, the last comment he/she’s made on a Facebook wall, and thanks to their status, you now know what they had for breakfast this morning. Or maybe you didn’t even go on this persons Facebook page at all and you unintentionally found this information out first thing when you logged in, thanks to your faithful “News feed”. If you are the average avid Facebook user, think of how many times a day you encounter this situation
Facebook and social networking is without a doubt an unavoidable phenomenon, and there is no use trying to change what it has become, but I often wonder if it has gone too far. Is there a limit to how much we should know about other peoples business, even if we just don’t care? What kind of effects is this going to have on our society in the long run? Or are we already beginning to feel the effects of it? Social networking has come a long way, but I can’t help but wonder if it is really here to stay, or if it will eventually just cancel itself out by becoming “too creepy” for it’s own good.
Facebook and social networking is without a doubt an avoidable phenomenon. Don't participate yourself, and don't hang out with people who feel the need to post pictures and information about you.
ReplyDeleteSunshine25 wrote about Tyler Clementi; he suicided because he believed that his private life had been made public.