The Social and Cultural Impact of the Facebook Worldwide

Facebook can be defined as a social media site. Facebook has a lot of users, with statistics showing that over a million users have subscribed to facebook services. It can be observed that too much of face booking can lead to addiction. A number of people rely on facebook, with a good number using facebook as a day to day guide. This shows how facebook has made people become obsessed with it. Facebook is the ultimate leader of the social media site, which is becoming part of the Y generation. Facebook has a lot of impacts and effects to the people who use it and those who do not in one way or another. Some of these impacts are either social impacts or cultural impacts. This essay discusses the impacts that facebook has to the entire world.

Negative Effects of Facebook to the Society

The social media, facebook, allows people to find their old friends, make new friends, join new communities such as work, school, region and city, send messages and have a good social interaction. However, misuse of facebook has some effects that have affected the social community in a large way. Some of these effects affect the user directly. They include the user having less time to work and learn. This happens when the facebook user uses almost every single minute of his or her time on the social site (Sreberny 2000).  It has also made the users lack the time to interact and socialize directly with some other people in the open environment. Before facebook got invented, most people used to pull through with matters which they saw as practical. However, that has changed since the  people who use most of their time on facebook has become a little bit lazy to an extent that they cannot deal with any difficult matter. Some of the adverse effects of facebook to the society include a reduced performance in the work place. A number of companies have employees who tend to be facebook addicts. In some institutions, the teachers and students sometimes use the facebook site during working hours. Even though, they cannot like to get caught, it is clear that facebook makes their work performance poor. If the amount of time spent on facebook can be used to do other relevant activities at the right place, the performances of the users may be improved (Magolda & Marcia 2011)

Too much of facebook makes the user have a decreased attention to their families. Whether this gets recognized or not recognized, it would finally happen if one goes to the extent of login in to their facebook accounts when they are with their families. A study conducted in England suggests that some parents spend lesser time with their children due to facebook, lesser than they could have spent with them if facebook did not exist. The children may be neglected if, for example, the father is busy posting stuff on their wall while the mother is busy commenting on photos uploaded by her friend, which leaves the maids with the entire duty of taking care of their children (Petrina & Terence 2004).

Facebook has made people forget about privacy. This is because since it is free to post anything on facebook, many people are writing a lot of private stuff, which should not be posted. This includes house hold problems, where people post them without their consent since facebook has become their only companion. Since there is a good number of people who concentrate much on other people’s statuses, they may end up knowing the private life of their friends which they should not know (Hansen & Smith 2010). Facebook can also be used by the users to spread pornographic material. This gets done mostly by creating of pages that contain pornographic content, and since most kids nowadays are in the social site, they get exposed to adult material, which they should not at their age. A lot of people have a misconception about facebook (Creeber & Martin 2008). People see facebook as a social network that is open for the users and his or her friends. Just like in real life, gossip and other slanted information may be spread at a high rate, but this time higher than the real life (Powell 2010).The worst thing with this is that the written information on facebook may be misinterpreted thus delivering the wrong information. This has led to some cases reported of fired employees due to facebook while others have taken matters to court system. Some fraudsters are using facebook to commit their crime. They happen to open new accounts, and since people may not know who owns that account, they ask to meet people whom they see as potential targets (Kappas & Krämer 2011).

Positive Effects of Facebook to the Society

Despite having many negative effects to the society, facebook has a number of positive effects. A good example of a positive society is that facebook makes it possible for a number of people to find their childhood friends which they got separated a long time ago. Relatives are in a position to stay connected to their families even though they are wide apart. Facebook can help one to stay on the know zone about upcoming events, movies and music which gets posted on facebook. Facebook has become a strong advertising site for businesses, which tends to be totally free. One can get life saving help and solution through facebook, be it a health problem or a social problem. An example can be given of a man who needed a kidney transplant, but they could not get a match from his family (Naren 2010). He posted his problem on his wall and one of his old friends volunteered to get tested, and he came out as a match thus saving his life.

Negative Effects of Facebook on Cultural Life

Facebook creates quite a hefty harm for people’s intellectuals and other forms of technical and tight community culture. Researchers observe people who use most of their times on the social site are turning on to become zombies. They get seen as just goalless people who just view pictures, watch certain videos and writing comments that are not meaningful throughout the day (Kirkpatrick 2011). The negative effect of use of facebook by people is common to a point that whenever there is free access to the internet, almost everybody tends to look at the social site. This has affected people’s culture. Whenever a person, be it young or old is in a position to access internet, and a computer, they just think of facebook. The amount of energy, which gets spent on tasks that barely make sense, is too much, where the tasks just create some form of entertainment which happens to be false entertainment (Alef & Zuckerberg 2010).

In the human culture, one has the opinion to choose who should be and should not be his or her friend. This can be done according to the common interests one sees in a person that makes the two compatible while the same case applies to the enemies. However, facebook has changed all that. Nowadays people have a large number of facebook friends, which they do not know anything about them. In the real life, one would be labeled as creepy if he or she goes on adding each and every person that they meet, either at school or workplace since one might just have a large number of strangers as friends. This is the case with facebook where people just add friends for the sake of popularity (Xin Gu 2010). Before facebook got invented, people would meet during their free time and socialize, be it with friends or families. This culture has been changed though where people has taken facebook as the best place to pass their free time. This has made the socializing culture die slowly. The people who do not actually socialize in real life end up adding a lot of friends on the social network. This gives them a false feeling that they are social. This habit of an addict being social only online may end up making them anti-social and miserable loners in their real life (Hammer & Kellner 2009).

Facebook gives it user the power to live a life full of lies, which leads to people forgetting the culture of being truthful which was there before they invented the social networks. Since no one can see them, people end up living their fantasies on facebook. People may Photoshop pictures and later use them as profile pictures and live as whoever they want to live like. Facebook has made people become cheats to the extent that one cannot be certain about them unless u meet them in person. There is the chat button on facebook that helps people chat in their privacy (O’Connor 2012). This too can turn people into cheats. For example, a 50 year old man from Singapore may pretend to be an 18 year old DJ from Texas. Facebook has also seen children lose their morals where they tend to post anything that they feel like, and when they get corrected by adults, they hurl insults to them and eventually block them. This indicates that facebook has reached a point of becoming a hate site rather than a social site. In some countries where there are cultural diversities, people use facebook to be tribal and spread hate speech through the site which at times may erupt to violence (Ziauddin 2002)

Positive Effects of Facebook to People’s Culture

Internet, through the social sites like facebook, has made the world be a global village. Facebook users may confirm that although the contacts they have is not face-to-face, it makes people staying in touch with each other to be easy. Just like people in the village stay interconnected, facebook users gets encouraged to share news, emotions and thoughts and know the well being of the other villagers with what they will share. Internet and the social site have helped in advocacies that get related to the environment and peace movements. Facebook has given people some good ways to share ideas, connect, communicate, interact and be closer (Anheier & Paul 2008).

Conclusion

The social site, facebook can get credited for providing people with the chance to stay connected with people who live far from us. Facebook has helped people to communicate constantly with people they are not in a position to see. However, facebook has been used to an extent that people who are much close to us and we are in a position to see them daily also becomes an online friend. It is such pities to see people who are friends in facebook pass each other in the streets like total strangers. Facebook has some positive and negative effects to the social life of human beings. One of the greatest negative effect facebook has on people is its slow killing of the communication culture which was there before, and creating a new culture of people who tend to be afraid to socialize with others. Despite facebook receiving mixed reactions from people, we cannot deny the fact that people use it in sheer numbers, and they can use it to distance people or bring them closer.

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