There are more than 800 million active Facebook users. For some it is a casual experience for others Facebook is a compulsory social activity. Roughly 200 million "personal" photos are uploaded everyday. This mass collector of personal information, mine and yours is the reason why Mark Zuckerberg is so rich. The gold in the mine is not the membership but the access to billions of snippets of information and connections. As a Facebook user I will argue whether it is a force for good or bad.
One of the best aspects of Facebook is the ability to make communication quick and easy. Those of us that use Facebook enjoy reading friends updates and comments providing conversation for when we meet outside of this virtual world. Some have even found love on Facebook. We also enjoy sharing wacky youtube videos, latest music, news and other media happenings from around the world. It can be a great tool for sending invites to party's and 'gatherings'. Perhaps if you wanted to track down and contact lost relatives or friends, Facebook would enable you to do so.
Facebook has also been hailed as a success in missing persons cases. The possibility of reaching millions of people, raising awareness of an individual's disappearance has never been easier. Law enforcement agencies are able to trawl through the hundreds of thousands of profiles to solve missing persons cases as well as criminal offences. Facebook has been key to the 'Arab spring' and other political movements such as the Occupy movement, without a doubt Facebook is for an open society that endorses freedom of expression.
Unfortunately as with many things there is a much darker side to social networks. Facebook on more than one occasion has caused controversy relating to personal privacy and data protection. With access to mountains of personal information identity theft has also been made easier. The ability to stalk and harass an individual is made simple to perpetrate. In some cases Facebook has been the trigger for much more serious crimes such as murder.
Bullying in itself is no new phenomenon. For centuries bullying has shaped society as we know it. However, Facebook and other social network websites have made the process faster, easier and in some cases detrimental - providing bullies with carte blanche. Reaching so many people in such short spaces of time is brilliant but in the wrong hands empowers the wrong people. Barely 20 years ago bullying in education would have occurred in one place, a controlled environment - school. Todays youth, through the use of Facebook and other virtual mediums have to face bullying both during school term and holidays. A worrying statistic is that only 15% of parents are "in the know" about their child's social networking habits.
Facebook is just an another platform for "trolling" and acts of defamation. In one notable case in Britain a man named Colm Cross was sentenced to 26 weeks in prison under the s127 of the Communications Act for posting obscene and hurtful messages on Facebook memorial pages. In the United States shortly after the suicide of a High School student named Alexis Pilkington, anonymous posters defamed her Facebook memorial page writing "suicidal slut". There are other more distressing and graphic cases involving such acts of cowardice. Leaked images of a car crash victim's mutilated corpse doctored for humour and then mailed to the relatives of the deceased is undoubtably one of the vilest acts of trolling some disrespectful people will perform for a "laugh."
Beyond the physical dangers of using Facebook are the more personal psychologically damaging effects. Researchers at the University of Southern California warn Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values. They found that emotions linked to moral senses are slow to react and to respond to the fast paced world we live in. "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality." Ms Immordino-Yang went on to say, "for some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection. Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention." Other known psychological effects attributed to using Facebook include envy, jealousy and the least secretive emotion - stress. Psychologists at Edinburgh Napier University indicated that Facebook adds stress to users' lives. "The causes of stress included the fear of missing important social information, fear of offending contacts, discomfort or guilt from rejecting user requests or deleting unwanted contacts." These effects can encourage lies and spin in order to give false impressions of social activity.
Perhaps it is breeding a culture of public humiliation? The ability to block contact from family members and close friends makes disconnecting from reality's relationships easier and a more public affair. A minor dispute resolved by blocking at the click of a button has the possibility to threaten an entire relationship built on solid foundations. As the French proverb says "Il faut laver son linge sale en famille". Have we forgotten that airing our dirty laundry in public has a consequence for all parties involved? And that family related disputes should remain private in order to prevent bringing shame upon the family name.
Civilisations go through shuffling trends of liberalism and conservatism. Both correct each other. Out of strict conservatism liberalism is born. Out of extreme liberalism conservatism is ushered in as the norm. Facebook and its qualities I argue, are a product of extreme liberalism. Facebook and other social networks have become a necessity in society. And as stated previously is now vital for communication within a free world. Just as these civilisation trends correlate with historical world changing events so do people's behaviour. More than 2000 years ago Aristotle said "friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies." This is just as relevant today as it was in his time, only then people didn't have Facebook. Instead they engaged in manual, hard won, loyal, slow ripening friendship. Today we are all too quick to trust and wish to make friends quickly, which is good but inevitably we do so at our own peril.
Is social networking a force for good or bad? It depends entirely on the individual and who they find friendship with. If we can maintain a strong moral compass whilst using Facebook then it is definitely a force for good. If we give our actions on Facebook no thought of the consequences because we perceive them as virtual, we may come to regret them later in life.
