All about social networking

For me personally, it is very hard to imagine life without social networking, and I'm sure that a lot of you feel the same way. But have you ever stopped and actually thought about what it is we're doing? For me, there are some really good pros to social networking, but then of course there are the bad things that come along with it. In this post I will be looking at two articles that discuss this phenomenon, and weighing what they say against my own personal thoughts on the subject.

In the first article, which you can find here, the first half really focuses in on the pros of social networking. One of the biggest being that it allows you to "...make connections with other people. This connection can be with people you may have fallen out of touch with, maybe a special friend you'd like to talk to, or just family that you have grown farther from.

Another major appeal of social networks applies mainly to people that want to get something of theirs out into the world. Many social networks allow you to share music, art, and many other forms of media in what ever way you see fit, and that's pretty awesome! I know several people that have posted their own songs to social networking sites, and gained a lot of attention from it, so needless to say that for me, this is a real pro. This allows to share these things for FREE, and that's pretty awesome.

Another pro that this article outlines is the entertainment aspect of some of these sites. Not only can you find and make new friends, but you can challenge them to fun games, help you solve a puzzle (Candy Crush comes to mind) and many other entertaining things. Now, in my opinion, this can be a bit of a con, and I'll explain why. When we get bored, often times we instantly go to these sites for an escape from that. This isn't "bad", but can lead to problems if it consumes too much of your life, or hinders productivity elsewhere.



Now the next article I read, which you can find right here, focuses on the detriments of social networking. In this rather brief article, the author describes a social outing with a few friends. He finds out that many of the people that were in his party had been "checking in", "tweeting", and posting pictures during the dinner. The author then goes on to say that due to the number of followers that one of the dinner guests have, their outing was visible to literally MILLIONS of people. Now, this is where social networking can get a bit scary. All of the people, most of which the author has no contact with or even knows have access to personal bits of the party's evening. It's almost weird to think about that. People you don't even know can see what you're doing, where you're doing it, and who you're with, all by checking Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare (the latter being the main topic of the article). I personally do not make use of the location services that social networking sites offer, mainly for my own peace of mind, but it is very clear that anonymity almost doesn't exist on these sites, which for me is a major draw back.