5 Social media

Social media is another topic that I found to be very entertaining over the course of the lecture because it would be almost impossible to say that you don’t know what Facebook or MySpace is if you are from my generation living the whole of your life in the western world. I think that they are very important to the development of the world. Think about the communication methods just 30 to 40 years ago, it was either a phone call to someone’s house or work, or it was a letter which took at least 3 days to arrive. But now you have 3G phones, you have things like Skype and Facebook which allow you to be in the other side of the world without even leaving the room you’re in. I think that that is a beautiful thing.

But this also has its limitations in the sense that face to face communication is becoming a very difficult and strange thing. People’s interaction skills become undeveloped because they can be whoever they want behind a computer screen without effort. Also someone with a 1000 friends on Facebook could potentially not even have a handful of real friends which they can interact with on a physical level.

This is also I think a dangerous thing because someone could pretend to be someone that they aren’t, you read about these things happening all the time with people meeting on Facebook and then meeting up and find out that person is a completely different person both physically and personality wise. This has led to a number of raping, assaults and deaths due to social media. But on the whole these things are designed to be tools to help people develop their lives and as my grandmother always says to me too much of anything is not good, which she is right about except cake you can never have enough of that.