Facebook and Social Networking

Just like pretty much everyone in our class, I have a facebook account. This is not say that facebook is necessarily a bad things, but I feel that once you get one, it's hard to get away from it. I remember when we had to track our time on facebook, I found that I was on anywhere from 5-15 minutes a day. I hadn't really posted any comments on walls, but I was drawn in by the fact that someone would have posted something on mine, or the ever changing status updates of all my acquaintances. Facebook is presently the standard of social networking, and with so much to do on the website, it seems rightfully so. Facebook creates a sense of connection and interaction with your friend list through updates, applications, and instant messaging. This helps enable people to be themselves online because of the lack of social pressures around you, and also allow people to reply to certain things according to their own liking. So social networking sites act as a way to keep updated on people around you, without you actually having to talk to them. Also, with social networking sites, the material you present is (as mentioned above) the way you want, so again, the social networking media is helping enable only what you want to come out. In a way, social networking has acted as a crutch for some of us who are shy about just what exactly to share to people we hardly know. As I surfed the internet for information, I found that some of the main reasons why people use facebook is because of its easy use. Along with easy use, came the fact that many people wanted to connect or reconnect to people they may or not have known. To me this just seems like another way of putting our own personality out there for the world to see, and thus, we have another media that helps us enable who we really are. Along with these findings online, I must also include the findings we had from our very own class. It seems as though many people used the aforementioned tools of facebook very reguarly, and it comes to me as no surprise. I found that about 3.85 million members of facebook are just strictly college students within the supported facebook colleges. The number is jaw-dropping, but it only seems as though the new wave of facebook and social networking is just beginning to come into fruition. Facebook already is supporting over 200 million active users, and plans to only get bigger by including community college and high school networks. It seems as though our generation of kids and teens will be using social networking media to showcase their personalities daily, that's how much social networking sites bring to the table.