Its Saturday night and i am too sick to even get out of bed. I don't know which is worse my fever or the fact that i can't stop thinking about my communications class and how good my professor is. I know the best thing to do is to get a good night sleep, but i can't help but turn to my computer check my Facebook account one last time.
Amongst many other mediums of communication Facebook is one of the most exciting and popular ways to keep in touch with friends and family. This website originally known as Thefacebook uses many innovative ideas to allow you to interact with others. Some of these include posting messages on friends walls, Poking a friend, sending a private message or even inviting friends to play games. Users can also join many groups to discuss certain issues or share common ideology and if your really bored you can always check out your friends embarrassing pictures and videos. Although this may sound very amusing and enjoyable and to some extent it is, there are many hidden facts that are submerged in the vast addictive world known as Facebook.
Lets start with the History of Facebook. Unlike some of its competitors such as MySpace, Hi5 or Xanga, Facebook was originally created for school purposes by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg as a way to keep in touch with his friends at the university. Furthermore, after being launched from his dorm room this piece of software soon became so popular that it was adopted by other universities such as Stanford and Yale. Soon after Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to pursue his dreams to run Facebook full time and after some time he sold the website for a known 200,000 dollars. Now I'm no rocket scientist but i think a Harvard degree in computer science is worth more then 200 000 dollars not to mention he probably spent that much during the time he spent on Harvard before dropping out. Well who knows maybe he did it for the fame but what ever the case i think it is safe to say that Mark Zuckerberg was the first to be affected by Facebook addiction. In fact Facebook addiction can take away time from your daily lives, time that you could be spending studying or making friends. To some extent it impairs a new generation of youth from being able to communicate socially because they are so accustomed to communicating through an electronic medium.
Apart from addiction and some damaged brain cells, another main disadvantage of using Facebook is the privacy factor. How would you like to have some complete stranger looking at pictures of you and your friends. As a matter of fact if your Facebook is not properly locked anyone can view your messages, pictures and videos. Moreover, if your careless enough to put your phone number and address in your Facebook profile, well lets just say sexual predators are not a thing of the past. Locking your Facebook is no easy task either since it is not visible during the initial registration process and well hidden under a small security link at the very bottom. To make matters worse securing a page is not always enough to stop strangers from viewing your complete profile since everyone from the same network can view your profile as well.
Being a first hand Facebook user i am well aware of the advantages of keeping in touch with hundreds of friends and family and I admit that its fun to poke a friend or beat them in table tennis without even getting out of bed; but is it really worth it to put ourselves in such a harmful environment all for a few moments of joy? I guess we will never know.
