Facebook: Exploiting Loneliness and the Fear of Being Alone

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On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg along with his friends launched a social networking site called Facebook. It was created for college students, specifically “only available to people at Harvard where I was at college,” says Zuckerberg in the TIME magazine article “The Future of Facebook”. “We rolled it out to all the colleges, all the high schools, then a bunch of companies could sign up, now everyone can sign up.” In a mere ten months since the launch, Facebook reached 1 million users. After ten years, Facebook now has on average over 757 million daily users according to statistics shown on newsroom.fb.com. With its increasing number of users in the past ten years since its launch, Facebook has become a growing international trend.
Facebook is an online social networking website that allows each person to upload their profile as well as pictures for others to search and view. However, certain information you post can only seen by those who have mutually agreed to become your “friends” through the process of sending and accepting friend requests. Facebook allows your friends to see whom you are “friends” with and vice versa, creating a large interconnected web of network. Also, in a world where speed and efficiency is becoming a need, Facebook is the number one source for fast and efficient communication exceeding the efficiency and convenience of emails, cell phones, and even face-to-face communication. Facebook has become a platform for people to stay connected with friends and family as well as their peers, all the time. Those of the same “group” (school club members, high school classmates, organization leaders) can easily communicate and exchange information to keep their members updated with announcements and future even...

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...ith each other? Our fear of loneliness or fear of rejection can be temporarily forgotten by Facebook, but can Facebook or other social networking tools create a culture that can create a permanent cure for these causes?

Works Cited

Bea, Francis. "This Week in Facebook: How to ‘kill’ Your Friends’ Profiles, Earn $10, and Cure Your Loneliness." Digital Trends. N.p., 16 Jan. 2013. Web. 20 Feb. 2014. .
Konnikova, Maria. "How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy." Editorial. New Yorker 10 Sept. 2013: n. pag. The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 10 Sept. 2013. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.
Locke, Laura. "The Future of Facebook." Editorial. TIME Magazine 17 June 2007: n. pag. Time. Time Inc., 17 July 2007. Web. 18 Feb. 2014.
"Newsroom." Facebook Timeline. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Feb. 2014. .

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