Social Networking: Keeping You Connected

Social networking opens up the world for its users, allowing them to keep track of people, places, and events in a completely new way. Instead of living within the limits of our physical environment, we can be in touch with the entire world. It creates a place for all of your friends, family and even coworkers to share little bits of their lives, satisfying our curious nature. It keeps us connected, simply put. Whether you are posting a "Happy Birthday" on your grandmother's wall, or tweeting about being at a concert and meeting up with friends who also had tickets as a result, social networking keeps us connected to anyone and everyone that we see fit.

Social networking gives us many different outlets of self expression. Twitter, for instance, allows 140 characters to express yourself, resulting, sometimes, in rapid-fire tweets, loaded with hash-tags about a particular subject. "Twitter is extremely customizable, with little of the social expectations that go with Facebook," says David Carr. He is absolutely right. There is much less pressure to return a follow on Twitter, than to accept or deny a friend request on Facebook. A network called Instagram, that seems to go hand-in-hand with have Facebook and Twitter accounts, allows users to upload photos and short videos of anything from what they're doing, to silly pet photos, to what they're eating, and the list goes on. You can literally post anything. For that matter, you can just as easily go in and remove anything you've posted, allowing you to totally customize your page and let others see life through your eyes, so to speak. Whether it be a tweet, a status update or photo upload, there is a network, or sometimes several, that is suitable for each of us.

The many types o...

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...the privacy settings. This gives us the freedom to share, or not to share, any certain thing with the people we choose. Beyond that, the many different networking sites create the option to choose which one, or which few, are right for you. I feel that this greatly enhances our communication with each other, and connection to each other as a society, simply because it allows us to share and, by doing so, relate with one another on common interests, while allowing more freedom of self expression when posting on a social network, thus making it easier to talk about in face to face expression.

Works Cited

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/05/teens-social-networking-good-for-them http://webtrends.about.com/od/socialnetworking/a/socialnetwork-y.htm http://www.ivillage.ca/health/womens-health/10-good-and-bad-ways-social-media-affects-your-mental-health