The effects of having a Facebook profile
Facebook. com was created in 2004 and has quickly become a college phenomenon. Lately, it has transformed from a small Harvard students-only project into an exclusive 600 million users strong social portal, offering a window into the people’s lives. Facebook, on its most basic level, redefines social networking and allows users to create and maintain virtual profiles that contain personal, academic and contact information. In many ways, Facebook has impacted on the social life and activity of people. The most common effects of having a Facebook profile are the lack of privacy, getting into addiction and neglecting the real, social life.
To begin with, one of the major effects of using Facebook is the lack of privacy. Facebook’s profiles are full of personal information like who people are, where do they work, what is their favorite music, movie or book. What religion and political beliefs are they. Moreover, there is also information where do people live and study. People share much of privacy, not only with their friends, but with strangers as well. Users upload their photos, let others to recognize them, consequently let others to know where do they party or who do they meet. Not by accident people say “Show me your Facebook profile and I will tell you, who you are”.
Another effect of having a Facebook profile is a problem of addiction to the social network. Indeed, people wake up on a Saturday morning with their cup of coffee, caressing their senses and relaxing their brains. Sitting at their desk and browsing on Facebook. They have 20 new notifications since the previous night, a few group invitations, a suggested page, 5 friend requests, few of which are unknown persons. What is more, they do it everyday, spend major time chatting, searching, poking people on Facebook. They stay indoors, plugged to the web, try to stay in touch with the news.
Whether they realize it or not, Facebook is a real part of their lives, a real partner that they see for good morning and kiss for good night. The last but not least effect of having a Facebook profile is neglecting the real, social life. First of all, it is quite easy to become one of many who have virtual relationships and before people realize it, they start to treat Facebook as their everyday social world. This, often results in a fear of real life meetings, as people who type a million words online, can find it difficult to express them-selves in real life.
Moreover, it is very common that people add other users of Facebook as their friends, barely knowing them and they pretend to have a lot of friends, when in fact, they know just few of them in real life. To sum up, Facebook is becoming more and more popular, virtual, gigantic social machine. But life is to live and there are thousand of things waiting for people in the real life, nevertheless, they still decide to live on a Facebook profile which strongly affects their lives. The major effects of having a Facebook profile are the lack of privacy, getting into addiction and neglecting the real, social life.
