Facebook: The Pros And Cons Of Facebook

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Online social networking sites, like Facebook, are simultaneously good and bad for its users. Facebook is both a useful tool and a waste of time depending on the view of the user. The positives of Facebook’s tools provide and maintain the ties and nodes from face-to-face interactions. Through posting comments, photos, and personal updates, whether likes or status updates, the user gains more social capital. In counter to these positives, Facebook promotes the notion of normalizing stalking, a continuous cycle of envy and the fixation upon oneself. To conclude the negatives of Facebook far out-weigh the positives, suggesting that people need to understand their virtual privacy, and that Facebook should be used as a service rather than convenient way to communicate between friends. Facebook is a facade of the user’s identity that provides a false sense of empowerment and ownership of their life.

One way that Facebook promotes networking is through posting comments. These comments are quick snip bits of communication that allow the person to know that you are thinking of them, and thus create a convenience communication (Young, 2011). Posting comments on friends’ profiles is the same as talking to your friends physically; some users of Facebook post “private and direct questions in public rather than via private …show more content…

It allows for strengthening of virtual relationships without the need of physical connection. Facebook provides a service to maintain and organize virtual relationships between friends, as well as promotes a normalization of stalking, a cycle of envy, and narcissistic behaviours. Facebook is a facade of the user’s identity that provides a veneer sense of empowerment and ownership of their life within the virtual realm. The user may believe that they are in control of what they put on the web and whom they show it too, but default privacy settings, number of friends and more dwindles the control that the user thought they

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