Facebook: Pros and Cons

Facebook = Antisocial Media

   Facebook is your life.

   Every day you make another post or a few comments on other peoples’ posts. You also spend hours following your friends’ posts or instant messaging them.

   This is your life and it should be deleted. Here’s why:

   Facebook may be your life but it is virtual one. A life fuelled by your pride in the smallest things you do. Waiting for the bus? Update your Facebook status! Eating toast? Notify your countless friends! In the year 15BF (before Facebook) these simple, little achievements in life did not require posting on the far corner of the World Wide Web. Nobody cared about them! So why do you use Facebook?
Perhaps you are unable to talk to people face to face. Another reason is that you might feel insecure so to fill the hole in your life you send notifications to your friends several times a day.

   Some people use Facebook solely for the purpose of organizing group events. A friend of mine discovered the dangers of doing this when she invited her friends to her birthday party. All her Facebook friends. All! She then had to awkwardly tell some of those friends that they were not actually invited. This situation would not have happened if she had used the old school method of calling her friends. The wider issue displayed in this situation is that people would rather send a single typed message to multiple people at once rather than taking the time to personally communicate with each person. This is an example of the culmination of human laziness and selfishness.

   Some people use Facebook as a way for them to appear social but actually they aren't. They use it to communicate with friends but don't talk to them in real life. These people and others like them build up a strong desire to stay updated and notified and often claim that they need Facebook. Facebook can be killed however. T. C. Scottek tells of how he quit Facebook in his article from the online news site The Verge: "I killed Facebook and left its body in the woods". He realized that "it only makes you more efficient - for doing things that Facebook invented". His point is that Facebook doesn't even help with anything in your life except for Facebook. It is making you dependent on itself and distracting you from the social activities you could be doing if you weren't being social.

   One of the greatest problems with Facebook is that people trust it. They post information on it that they might hold back in a face to face conversation. This is a bad idea: You are being watched, evaluated and tested on. The NSA has posed as Facebook so that people unsuspectedly installed malware on their computers. The FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies have been rumoured to also hack Facebook. Your future employer may also check out your Facebook profile to see if you are the right person for the job. It is an increasingly popular way to evaluate peoples' attitudes and their character. You could miss out on a job just because you sent someone an anger-fuelled message once when you were fed up. Finally Facebook is not only monitoring you, they are using you as a guinea pig. A couple of months ago Facebook experimented on its users by omitting either positive posts or negative news from several hundred thousand users news feeds and recorded whether the users were more likely to post positive or negative comments based on what they'd read. This news caused an outrage among Facebook users when they found out that they'd been tested on. They had no cause to though, as when you sign up to Facebook you have to agree to their terms and conditions. One of the conditions is that you agree to be tested on. Stories like the ones mentioned have alerted me to the dangers of posting information about yourself on the net. Your friends are not the only ones reading it!

   There are people who expect everyone else to have and use Facebook. I personally have friends complain that I don't have Facebook and they get uptight. Texting costs money and emails are so last century so they complain that Facebook is the only way to organize events. They forget that before every kid had a smartphone or a Facebook account the way to invite people to an event was to call them. Talking to your friends on the phone is a lot more social than a quick, typed message over the net. It feels more personal, direct and trustworthy. It has been proved that people are more likely to lie when they are typing a message than when they are talking. Therefore it can be claimed that by using Facebook people are being both less social and less trustworthy.

   If I asked anyone to list all the reasons of why Facebook is good I am sure that they'd be able to give me a long list of them. How many of those reasons can actually be justified? Examine your own excuses for why you use Facebook. If all of those reasons can be traced back to Facebook then kill it. I don't have a Facebook account and yet I am alive, kicking and have a great social life. T. C. Scottek realized that Facebook is pointless so he deleted it. Now he is like me.
   Will you join us?