The year is 2003, and Harvard computer science student slash “programming prodigy” Mark Zuckerberg is in his dorm room perfecting his latest conquest- ‘Facemash’ –a campus-internal internet site for rating Harvard’s female student populace; “hot” or “not”. Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory less in February 2004, and less than ten years later, his original project has expanded to one of a much greater magnitude. A fast phenomenon, Facebook has taken our generation by storm, and nowadays a college student who doesn’t have a Facebook page is regarded almost as an outcast. With one billion active users, a number that is growing daily, Facebook seems to be at the core of our interaction with one another in the knowledge-based society in which we live. But take a moment to ask yourself the question- is Facebook ruining your life?
Don’t get me wrong, I am an unashamed social networking fan and have used Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Twitter in my time. But are my five-hundred-and-something Facebook friends giving me a false sense of achievement? Are the vast majority of these “friends” people I would just walk by on the street, without stopping to chat, or worse again, without even saluting them? Facebook, and sites like it, are corroding the intimacy of our human relationships in the 21st century. In my opinion, many of us are losing the ability to make friends of our own accord, and we rarely meet peers whom we know nothing about, as we have probably already “stalked out” their social networking profiles. We know who people are friends with, what clubs they’ve been in, where they spent the summer, and what bands they’ve seen. We know all about their families, ages, occupations and interests. Our lives are laced with the pretense of our online identities, an Internet personality we have constructed, someone we strive to be but are often a thousand miles away from.
Forget the references you’ve included on your CV, your social networking site is the most reliable reference of all, and the daunting truth of the situation is that potential employers know this, and are consulting these websites on a daily basis. Imagine spending all that time on CV writing and interview training and then you don’t get the job because of an old post on your Facebook? A survey by careerbuilders.com in the U.S. recently revealed that 45 percent of employers used social network sites to research job candidates. Your unsavoury photographs could be preventing you from being hired, or worse again, could be the cause of your redundancy. Take Brian Colvin, for example, an intern at Anglo-Irish Bank, who having alerted his employers of a family emergency to gain time off work, was later outed by his Facebook page when pictures appeared of him attending a Halloween party at the time, or the Las Vegas school teacher who lost his job at a Catholic school after declaring himself a homosexual on his MySpace page. In a bid to alert America’s youth of the perils of careless social networking, President Obama stated: “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life and when you’re young, you know, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who, you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job, and somebody has done a search.” Do we really want our employers, or potential employers, for that matter, perusing our personal photographs? Of course we don’t. Sure, these pages are safe if you’ve activated the correct privacy settings, but many who have not risk being found out. Would you email your boss a picture of yourself at the end of a night out? Didn’t think so. But the fact is that your drunken antics as a teenager could come back to haunt you in later years when you enter the job market.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years, you’ve heard tales of woe regarding the dangers of social networking sites, particularly, but certainly not exclusively, when in use by young children. The age that children begin to start making use of social networking seems to be becoming younger and younger.
Now, twelve and thirteen-year-olds are surfing the Internet freely, and are, unbeknownst to many of their parents, leaving themselves wide open to hazards like pedophiles and cyberbullying. The stats on sites like broadbandsearch show how cyberbullying still continues to be an issue in today’s society. It is time for this to change, especially as there are so many people on social media platforms.
According to Fox News, as many as 7.5 million children under the age of thirteen are using Facebook and many of them are unaware of the dangers, adding information such as their addresses and mobile phone numbers to their profiles, along with suggestive photographs and inappropriate comments and status updates. Facebook have a policy whereby under-thirteens are not allowed to use the site, but with the click of a mouse, a child can easily claim to be a year or two older. Facebook is an easily accessible platform for stalkers, rapists and pedophiles and these offenders are using social networking sites every single day, often posing as teenagers and using fake profiles to lure in young girls. Social networking sites can also pose a serious risk to adults, however. Take, for example, the case of Sarah Richardson of Staffordshire, England. A woman who had just left her husband, Richardson changed her relationship status from ‘married’ to ‘single’ on her Facebook profile, igniting her husband’s rage and inspiring him to track her down and stab her to death at her parents home.
Facebook-ing is an undeniably unhealthy addiction for a number of reasons. It promotes paranoia and consumes precious time that could be spent doing something worthwhile, like exercising, studying or spending time with family. However, would we live without Facebook? Probably not.
