Social Networking

Social Networking Sites have made a huge leap in creating new trends to getting through our day to day lives. The prospects of SNS is endless and will just continually and exponentially grow to expedite menial tasks. However with everything there are also negative aspects to SNS. First lets start off with the positives. SNS is responsible for spreading information faster than any other media. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are sources for a lot of the news, closely ranking to newspapers! Nowadays companies are usually on two or more social networks for recruiting purposes. The efficiency and wider pool of applicants is appealing to businesses. With the use of websites like LinkedIn, companies can hire from a larger pool of applicants and be able to narrow their search more efficiently. Students also report to doing better in school because of SNS. Because they can go on forums or discussion groups to help each other out, they have reported to getting better grades.

Now some of the negatives of SNS. I think most importantly is the lack of privacy. Sites like Facebook is easily accessible by anyone with access to a computer with internet connection. Being able to post photos, status' and personal information that is not necessarily confidential is somewhat of a threat. Not only that but other users can post photos of you as well and tag you, even without consent! Of course if you are responsible there will be no privacy issues and the use of SNS is greatly beneficial. However you must mind what you say and post. Before i said that SNS had the potential of helping students get better grades. Well it can have an adverse effect as well. Studies show a significant increase in GPA from non social media users to social media users. Social media is deemed to be a huge waste of time. There is also a problem with people not being able to interact face to face anymore. Now that the world is so connected virtually, the social skills of today's people have drastically decreased. People tend to look down at their devices rather than look up and socialize. I have experienced this first hand, especially when people meet for the first time. The first thing either party does in an awkward situation is take their phone out of their pockets and fumble around with it. Its kind of pathetic and scary that people don't know how to socialize. Its okay to be awkward, its normal.

I think that SNS is an amazing tool to have and i know it will only grow larger with time. Every day there is more and more functionality with SNS and nothing will stop the growth of these technologies. The advancement of these technologies has already passed its tipping point and there is no stopping it. In the future there will be huge advancements and benefits from all these new technologies. However i have this gut feeling something is going to go terribly wrong in the process and we as a society will have to pay a huge price for it, learn from our mistakes, and start all over.

Sources:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6522523&sc=emaf
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=59708&u=pg_dtl_art_news&m=pg_hdr_art
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Who-Cares-About-Facebook/25877/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/technology/internet/14facebook.html?_r=1&ref=business.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115412710465720901-Ah3MvEIHa4T2Ck8IgsXrr01znUw_20070728.html