Who doesn't love Facebook?
"I only go on when I need to talk to someone or when I'm really bored or I need to share something with the world,” says Cameron Morrell. “Or when I'm sad or angry."
"I go on because I am addicted,” says Aliyah Gregory. “I don't really know why, but I feel the need to get on every night and check the latest news feed."
Facebook, the familiar social networking site that most of us know, was launched in February 2004, and now has about five hundred million users. Co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has grown a lot in seven years. Zuckerberg was only nineteen, and a sophomore at Harvard when he launched the original site, “thefacebook.com”. After the creation of the world's most used and visited social network, controversy never ended. Facebook has evolved throughout the years, and nobody knows what it will look like in a year or two or ten.
Facebook seems to be a word that most teenagers and adults know. People use it when they have nothing else to do except stick their noses in other peoples business, play Farmville, or play the other various games on the site. People can “facebook” (a verb) rather than speak face to face; this causes variety of problems. Students may even be two-faced, expressing their emotions better through FB. This can cause anger and frustration among students on Facebook. But on the bright side, Facebook has helped some people re-connect with long lost friends, or family.
At home, at their friends' homes, at work, even at school, Facebook is everywhere. Yes, school, where it isn’t permitted, but somehow students find the need to go on it anyway. And of course they have the techno-savvy to do it. Why work on homework when we can just go on Facebook? What is so addicting about Facebook that students have a need to go on it during school hours? Is it just the fascination of posting what exactly they are doing every ten minutes? Going on Facebook during school may even affect some students' grades, depending on how frequent they go on. Some students even lie about being on Facebook, despite the evidence that shows they're violating school policy.
Myspace is also a popular social networking site, up in the rankings, right below Facebook. Yet Facebook has twice as many users. There was a time when Myspace dominated over Facebook, but nowadays, Facebook is number one. It seems Myspace won’t be able to catch up to Facebook. But now, Facebook has become so popular that there is a major Hollywood film, “The Social Network” that grabbed Oscar nominations. In upcoming years, who knows, there might just be another social networking site that will skyrocket above Facebook, and there might be yet another movie about the certain site.
Students can go on Facebook through portable devices such as cell phones or even iPods. School may be boring at times, but is it so boring that students must consume time on this site, rather than getting schoolwork done? I could see where students would use this popular site after school, but during school hours is a little crazy. Facebook has gotten just a little out of hand these days.
Adults complain about the instant messaging, how it needs fixing, or how it affects kids. Seven years from the time it was founded, Facebook is still going under changes. Is it too much to say that Facebook's impact on society is overrated? Some say so, but most Facebook fanatics just love the site. Facebook still needs to undergo changes, but meanwhile, most teenagers and adults are happy with the site just the way it is.
For some, such as Lauren Harris, Facebook fulfills simple needs. She says she goes on FB “so I can play the games available, like Penguin Toss.”
Who knows, there could be as many as eight hundred million users in the upcoming years.
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