Introduction
I'm going to research what affects social networking sites have on society. I
will focus on one social networking site, Facebook, and the affects it has on
business, schools, and relationships. I want to see if Facebook primarily has
positive or negative affects on business, schools, and personal relationships
within a society.
Current
Use
To further my research, I have found the current use of the social networking site, Facebook
including how many people use it and the demographics of those people. Facebook
is used by a variety of different people across a variety of different
countries and a variety of different demographics. I am going to focus on the
United States as my country of focus and see how many people currently use
Facebook. I want to see what the main age group of users is and what people
mainly use it for. Some businesses use social networking sites such as Facebook
to promote sales and get their name out there. Some schools use social
networking sites such as Facebook to connect teachers with their students.
Relationships might be the most affected by Facebook because of the exposure of
people’s personal lives and the ability for anyone to view a person’s profile
or contact someone.
Security
Security and account privacy settings that the social
networking site, Facebook has to offer are very important but how many of its users actually use
them? Facebook usually updates its privacy settings and options quite
frequently. As a user myself, I get updates at least monthly saying that the
privacy settings have been modified. The creators of Facebook have increased
security so that users are able to block access to their profiles to certain
people, only allow their designated friends to view their profile including
their pictures, posts, etc. This increasing security allows people to choose
who can see anything they put on the website and who is not allowed access.
There are of course some loopholes around these restrictions, however, that is
why Facebook is always updating its privacy settings and creating more options
for a safer, more secure social networking site.
Ethical
and Social Implications
There are ethical principals that should be enforced on Facebook
because of the negative outcomes that bad ethics have on relationships,
business, and school. Facebook ethics includes, but is not limited to,
netiquette, only posting appropriate posts and pictures, etc. Even though these
ethical principals seem to be common sense to most people, others who are mean
spirited use Facebook as a way to bully others. Online bullying, or cyber
bullying, has become a huge problem and has even lead to people committing
suicide.
Future
Use
There seems to definitely be a future for Facebook but also other upcoming and
newly popular social networking sites as well. There has been emergence of other sites that
serve different purposes instead of such a broad social networking purpose that
Facebook offers. These new sites include, linkedin, instagram, and twitter.
Linkedin is a more professional, business social networking site that can
connect people. Instagram is where the creative people come together to share
and compare photos. Twitter is a more compact version of social networking
where users are limited to how much they can include in a post or ‘tweet’.
These are other newly emerged social networking sites that many Facebook users
are choosing to join as well. Facebook has also recently put itself out on the market of stock. Will people continue to invest in Facebook, or will they start to invest more in these other upcoming sites?