Facebook: Good or Bad?

Facebook has become one of the world’s largest social networking cites on the internet and keeps growing every day. The website use to be open only to college students, but then started growing until high school students and everyday people could become a member. Today there are over three million people who have accounts on facebook.
Since Facebook is open to everyone now, is Facebook safe and a good place to have your personal information online? There are so many people we do not know who are also on Facebook and with the technology today, people can easily access your information even if it is set to private, which many people probably do not think about when they upload pictures and other information to the website. Is your profile truly only visible to friends when it says it is?
If you are not sure if your profile is safe would you want your thirteen year old child to have an account? I would not want my child too. MySpace use to be the social networking when I was in middle school and it has the same concept in a different format, but still allows people ages 13 and older to have an account. Even if their parents monitor what they are doing on MySpace and facebook and who they are friends with, it is still a scary place for them to have a profile. There are a lot of older men who like to have profiles and claim to be younger boys and girls that try to become there friend and then want to meet in person. This is a situation that nobody wants to be in, but is even scarier for a young boy or girl who is only 13 years old. Which is why you should not have profile until you know you can handle the responsibility that comes with it. Having an account on Facebook, you have to be responsible for your actions. Where this is inappropriate statuses or pictures that are not appropriate or even ones that show you breaking the law. A lot of high school and young college students like to post pictures of them drinking, which can lead to other people seeing them and reporting you to different people.
I think that your profile is only visible to friends, but then again technology keeps changing and people are learning how to hack into others profiles and steal information and pictures and even stalk someone. Many people in today’s society refer to people as “Creepers”. The term Creeper is a slang term that has just become popular in the past few years. When most people refer to that they are talking about someone who looks at your profile on Facebook or is always watching you and doesn’t say anything.
Many people do use facebook and most of the people wouldn’t be considered creepers. Facebook is an excellent way to keep in touch with friends and family. Since graduating from high school, facebook has been the only communication I have had with some of my friends since they go to other schools and it is hard to talk on the phone or video chat over Skype. If we didn’t have facebook I truly wonder how we would stay in contact with friends that go to other schools.
I know it has been done in the past before computers were invented and Facebook and Skype were ever imagined, but still how do we all rely on one website to feel like we are important to see one little notification pop up in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. Most people don’t sit at their computers all day staring at facebook just waiting for something to happen, but what if there are people who do? Will facebook make them have social issues when they become younger or during their life right then. It is one thing if you are doing work and leave facebook open, because many students do that because they are talking with friends on facebook chat. I know this cannot be healthy for them, but what can we do about it? We cannot make them get off of facebook and do work, or instead of sitting there going outside and getting fresh air or working out. In our parents generation facebook and computers did not exist and it was a whole different world to them. I sometimes wonder if all the computers, facebook accounts, iPods, cell phones, blackberries and other items that are like this were taken away from my generation if we would be able to survive without them? I really think my generation would not be able to handle it.
Another item that we take for granted is Microsoft Word. As I sit here and type this blog about facebook and what the world would be like without it, I started to think what our world would be like without the other technological devices we have and Microsoft word is one that almost every college student uses daily. We forget how much simpler life is when we have the privilege to type papers and not have to hand write them. It is really sad to see that my generation does not know how to write in cursive. I learned this when we took the SAT’s last fall and spring because when you take the SAT’s or ACT’s you have to write in cursive a statement saying you did not cheat and then sign your name. You would have been surprised to see how many students agreed with one another that they do not remember how to write in cursive. This is a simple task that we learned back in elementary school, but since we do everything on the computer now, we have no need for cursive except for rare occasions. Which makes us less appreciative of what we have in our world now and how we need to appreciate the little things in life. No matter what we decide to put on facebook, or what technology we use, we still need to remember what is important to us and not let anyone influence what we believe in.