ColleenConway, Edison: FaceBook - My new BestFriend?

4. September 2010 by student.

As I looked around the school library the other day, roughly two-thirds of the computer screens were showing FaceBook.   Now I am sure those students were working on school work as well, after all we have become a world of multi-taskers.  My question is, how is this affecting our social culture?  More and more of us are socializing, and getting our news and information, not just from the Internet, but from FaceBook.  Per FaceBook’s statistics page, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics there are 500 million people using FaceBook, and 50% of those active users log in, in any given day.  The average person has 130 friends.  Are those friends our new social group?  Do we spend more time with them than those friends who are real skin and bone?  Sure some of those people overlap; they are true people seen everyday or occasionally, and there are family members and people who live across the country and world.  It is a wonderful way to keep in touch.  Do we pick up the phone as much now though?  Do we (you remember these, right?) write letters, send cards??

FaceBook has a certain safety zone for people… you can look and snoop and get information on people anonymously, you can communicate in the safety of your reviewed responses world.    You can even obtain information on people you don’t know at all. 

There was a news story last night, on a young girl who was killed - she was a friend of my daughters so, I easily found her page and from there, her boyfreind’s page, who was accused of the crime.  The 11 O’Clock News used their FaceBook pictures on the breaking news.   There is always a thin line on sharing and a need for privacy.  Sometimes your best friend can turn on you. 

The Internet has always been a plethora of visual, intellectual, and social information.   FaceBook wraps it up nicely.  I just hope my time spent in my virtual friendships does not diminish my time spent looking into someone’s eyes to commiserate with their issues or share in a hug of happiness, and I must be vigilant in the secrets and pictures I share with my BestFriend(s). 

FaceBook keeps me in touch with many friends I would otherwise not get to know what is going on in their lives.  I must remember though,  it is not a subsitute for getting out into the world and sharing.  For even though I can sit here with my laptop and my 160 friends, I am still alone.

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