Facebook

Off hand, it seems like online social networking plays a huge role in people’s lives. In high school, I definitely had a tendency to spend too much time online. I would always be on Facebook, posting new comments and reading friends posts and looking at their new photos. However, I rarely used other accounts such as Twitter or FourSqaure. To date, I have never made an account for those latter two sites. I would typically spend upwards of a couple hours a day reading new posts to stay up to date with my friends. Once college started, though, I began expanding which sites I would visit. A couple friends of mine introduced me to Reddit, and I was quickly hitched. Reddit is essentially an online forum where people can post cool things they have found around the web or in the world. Reddit also quickly led me to make an account on StumpleUpon, which is somewhat similar in that it will lead you to new parts of the Internet that you might otherwise ignore. Meanwhile, my use on Facebook has declined drastically. I occasionally will go a couple days without checking my news feed now. My best guess for why this happen is that I live down the hall to my friends who I would otherwise be keeping up with on Facebook. By easily being able to talk to them in person, I have eliminated the need to do so over the Internet.

            For the most part, I think the use of online interaction to be a positive thing, as long as it is within reason. If you let it get out of hand, and let it control how you live your life, then it obviously is a negative thing. But with moderation, Facebook can be a great tool to contact friends about an event or reconnect with people.  But with all those positives, there are also plenty of negatives. Privacy is at an all-time low; anything that you post can be easily seen by anyone on the Internet if you do not take the proper precautions. For some people, this can pose a big problem, but for the most part for myself, I have been able to avoid “over-sharing”. I try not to post too much petty things, and often try to screen what I post.