Pros and Cons of Social Media: Analysis of Facebook

Social media has been a popular trend ever since the invention of the World Wide Web. It gives the user the ability to access a variety of communication between families, relatives, and friends – even strangers. It often credits to its transparent and open connection with other companies through advertisement. However, many problems are faced in the advancement of such technology. For example, its influence on people, scamming and rapid changes in both local and global news. For some social media often viewed negatively due to the common idea that no communication was executed. This problem has made me want to access the importance of Facebook along with other social media is not simply just for its entertainment but also a way to which help modernizes the experience of a new generation. In modern days, when technology grows with a rapid speed, especially the internet. There are many subjects online to discover, to learn and it also leaves a huge effect on young generations. Facebook, social media, is one of the subjects that impact teenagers nowadays. However, like everything in the world, Facebook and social media have two sides of pros and cons.

What is Facebook? Facebook is online social networking that was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg along with his friends at Cambridge, MA. The reason why Mark Zuckerberg had the idea of Facebook as he saw he could find anything on the internet such as music, news, information but he couldn’t find where that he could connect with people around him which led him created Facebook. The original purpose was creating an online community for Harvard students and students from other universities (Hall). However, later on, it expanded and was available for anyone who is 13 and older with a valid email address to join. Beyond Mark’s expect, Facebook has become one of the most popular social media in the world where we can connect with people from different countries, having the same interests, especially our friends and people around us. Facebook is very popular for the young generation who get in touch with the internet more than other generations. “Today, Facebook is the world's largest social network, with more than 1 billion users worldwide.” 

Communication is an important aspect of what differs Facebook from previous technology. It offers a simple implication for its user to create a profile on the internet and allow them to connect with friends, families, and relatives. Facebook helps people getting connected to other people even if they’re far away by messages and calls. Unlike in the past, people have to connect by letters what taking months to arrive and took a lot of money for a call internationally. Specifically, it offers free message and call which are one of the most convenient features of Facebook for people who live far away from their family like international students and people who work in a different country to get connect with their family and friends easily. In addition, Facebook and along with other social media app are great places for making new friends with people from all over the world with the same interests and study new cultures. Facebook is social media with a diversity of individuals.

Besides features of message and call on Facebook, Facebook provides full of news and information on its newsfeed and app. Nowadays, young generations are likely inactive in reading the news by themselves on newspapers or even news websites, but they could see and get interested as they see news and information on Facebook newsfeed due to its trend and popularity. People are also likely curious and start to read or watch about something when they see many people read or watch it. However, the rapid changes in delivering how news was cover also allow the continuation of misinformation on advertisements and websites. Especially, in the active sharing feature of Facebook, that hints a greater problem at hand where false information could be delivered faster than news operation. Facebook still help everyone gain information and knowledge. There are tons of groups on Facebook with many subjects, interests, and topics. We can make friends with others on the same hobbies or interests or whatever that we like and focus on. It also helps students could join a study group with a specific subject and help each other study or answer questions.

Self-expression is one of the positive instruments that Facebook allows its user to be. Besides as a tool for communication, Facebook humanized the function of anonymity where users can also not indicate their identity in their profile. The nature of the function allows many people to be comfortable in their opinion, interest, and ideas about certain topics. This vague identity and indefinite rules encourage participation in a wider range of community and relationship than its user relative area. Another positive feature of Facebook is that it helps others express themselves like their feelings, interests, and photos by status posting and sharing. This feature helps shy and low self-esteem can be more positive on social media under anonymity. They can express themselves easily by updating status, posting pictures, share music and interests can help them having support by others which they can’t express directly in real life or talking face-to-face. The feature collects memories of its user’s activities and allows other strangers or acquaintances to see the character of the person.

Inevitably, entertainment is one of the common bases we frequently utilized in our daily lives. In fact, entertainment also was a part of how our society was made. From music, video, poems, stories, and including Facebook and other media were connected to our people and the values. It gives people a delightful time and from all the stresses in their life. Even though, entertainment had several of individual forms of elements, each of them expressed its own ideas and attention to the people’s interest. Facebook shows a list of trending videos and topic to captivate its users with the current trending idea. The rapid news allows its user to catch up with both important and popular activity of people in their area. That plays a significant role in both local and global awareness in their country and others. This rapid information also allows the user to accept different interest of family members and friends.

Social trends have always been a part of our life ever since we learn how to become someone. It becomes this kind of social entertainment from the first step of the humankind to today, where Facebook is pretty much the main and clear picture of what social trends is. Facebook provides us various daily entertainment, like news, connect with friends, games, advertisements and other function that gives us the feeling of being a teen and youth that continuously changes since 1999. However, it also used to spread hatred ideas against the public view.

One of the main cons of using Facebook from teenagers is addicted to it which leads to wasting too much time on it. Not only Facebook but other social media apps might cause addiction to people especially young generations or teens. When teens get addicted to social media apps, they spend an enormous amount of time on their phone to check on social media apps to see what’s new or texting with friends. It shows a bigger problem as a large percentage of teenagers forget about their life and focus on developing their status using social media as a platform. It’s problematic as through life may go on as it is. The people wasted their time to become unaware of the necessary preparation for college or reality as they move into adulthood. Moreover, it proves to be an easy distraction in class if they keep checking things and messages on Facebook without paying attention to other things and time-wasting if they use their phone or social media app with an inappropriately way. It will build a bad habit in the long term while unaware that it’s a problem that needed to be solved. While, Facebook technology intently to improve people communication, addiction made it difficult to conform in the society where expectations are only seeing on social media instead of reality. This applies heavily to young people where they admired the perfect life of someone on Facebook. This discourages them as they see others who are more fortunate to have something they wanted.

“Surfing Facebook does show abnormal symptoms among many teenagers such as depression, excessive aggression, abnormal anxiety or even normal anxiety.” One negative side of expressing yourself on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is having negative comments and reactions. Teenagers might be impacted by negative comments or likes which affect their emotions and thinking about their self-image and their look. Using phone while talking to others, which leads to a lack of emotional connection to others and lack of body language communication. It also leads to a lack of empathy in people as they are too heavily focused on their own world instead of others. In these days, everyone carries their phone around with them and use it to check on social media all the time, even when they are talking with another person in front of or next to them. It might make others feel annoyed and think that they don’t pay enough attention to the conversation. “The National Safety Council reports that uses of cell phone lead to 1.6 million crashes every year”. The distraction not simply impact the people mental health but also causes danger to others as this new form of technology became an addiction and a necessary material in daily life. One of the problems that Facebook had is its rapid report of others’ activities. Events such as party, family trip or birthday are one of the few components that make people desire to check Facebook. In which, the feeling of getting updated about others’ lives and our imaginary duty of responding and providing the poster a message.

Another problem that happened on social media is the teenager who is innocent could get deceive or trick by strangers to do bad pieces of stuff which might lead up to criminal cases. Everywhere has good and bad people as well as social media like Facebook. There are bad people who try to deceive, lie and use other people for their own purposes which affect the victim’s life and mental health later. This also applies to many establishments that tried to trick people into buying their product or service or older people luring young children into their house with special offerings. Young children who use Facebook should be watch and control by their parents in case there are strangers who try to approach or texting them.

As seen from the essay, Facebook and social media in general, have both sides of its pros and cons like every trending thing in the era. From the Jazz Age to Rock it gives the people a sense of compassion and connection with the generation of their era. It was something fun, popular and cool and just like everything in the world also have two sides of positive and negative, so we could research, analyze, understand and acknowledge about it. As the Zen people once said “Reincarnation means this: that if you sitting here now, are you really convinced that you’re the same person who walked in at the door half an hour ago, you are being reincarnated. If you’re liberated you’ll understand that you’re not. The past doesn’t exist. The future doesn’t exist. There is only the present and that is the only real you that there is.” For certain that in some way or another, the person that co-exist in ourselves or “we” have always been who we are. The characters that made up ourselves gave us define visual that shows who we are and where we stand as in the society a human, as a co-living thing along the fickle, receding chain of life. Facebook is a place where we can get connect with other people in communication, making new friends. It’s also where we can get information, study with others and express yourself. However, there are things about Facebook that we should be cautious when using it like don’t overuse and let it affect your health physically and mentally or even being a victim of strangers. As it suspense growth of modern technology also introduces a new problem in our society. In order to use Facebook in a healthy way, we should have knowledge about it and understand what we should and shouldn’t do so we don’t let it affect your life in a negative way.