Facebook has changed and added a new realm of communication for people all around the world. With the introduction of this website a culture surrounding the likes of a thing poking friends have emerged from this social media site. My research question on Facebook is: With the introduction of social media website specially Facebook, did it change the social paradigm for adolescents negatively? Despite all the good Facebook have done to the world in changing how human being interact and making it more accessible. I believe for adolescents the harmful effects outweigh the good. Facebook has a huge link to pop culture considering the large user base it has and how many companies and other forms of media talk about it and use it. Facebook has been a part of American culture for some time and that will probably not change. I know a bit about Facebook because I currently am a user of Facebook and I know many people who do use it. Over the course of my experience I noticed that I do thing on Facebook that I would not do in real life. I have befriended people on Facebook that I do not regularly talk to or even possibly never even talked to? Why is this a normal thing? Why is this activity not considered weird and not dangerous. Based on my experience I know Facebook has its own culture but I want to focus on the negative affects on adolescents and see if it changes their outlook on social norms and how they interact. Is Facebook harmful to adolescents or is it simply their own fault because they use the website in negative ways? I need to learn what kind of effects using the website has on teenagers in America. Does it change their outlook on life or relationships? Does it breed bad social norms and change how children interact with each other?
I would love your comments on how to approach this question and also your personal experience that you have noticed in yourself using Facebook.
This is a good topic to research. Facebook has such a profound influence and daily role in the majority society. After meeting a person for the first time, many immediately see if said person is a member of Facebook in order to find out more about them and to stay in contact. While I think your topic addresses a topic extremely relevant in today's society, I might try to broaden the study to different age groups that Facebook affects. This might demonstrate a stronger depiction of the widespread influence of Facebook on society.
ReplyDeleteHi, Raymond! Your question is very interesting:"With the introduction of social media website specially Facebook, did it change the social paradigm for adolescents negatively?" I don't think that it changed social paradigm negatively. It could change negatively only for addictive persons, but addictive persons every time could find something negative in real life. I'm on Facebook for some years, but it is good for me. Because when I find a time, I open my e-mail and then go to Facebook. I read news from my friends and relatives, I see new postures and everything is OK. Sometimes I chart with my daughter. She lives in Houston. I think that Facebook is very positive social media. We learn how to upload new picture, good links, write on the walls and so on. We learn how to moderate our pages. I find a lot of interesting things about writers, poets, artists. I have a lot of interesting things to read and to watch, but I don't have enough time for Facebook. I think that everybody must learn how to manage time and how to have polite conversations with people.
ReplyDeleteI think you need to look at the positives in addition to the negatives in your paper, even if your holistic conclusion is that Facebook is corrupting youth and making them socially, behaviorally, and physically unhealthy. (For that last you could either go the appearance oriented route and discuss the relationship between social pressures and eating disorders, or you could talk about obesity, claiming that social media is a distraction from important aspects of health like exercising and taking the time to eat healthy.) Overall though, I don’t think that social media is a black-and-white issue; it has both good and bad aspects that we need to take into account when we look at Facebook’s effect on our culture.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean about using Facebook to “friend” people we would not normally talk to in real life. The downside is that we become desensitized towards others, and the meaning of “friendship” seems trivialized or commercialized by the media. As a current high school student, I’ll be the first to tell you how annoying all the “PLEEEASE VOTE ME FOR SENIOR BEST _________!!!!! <3” posts are. I am extremely proud of myself for not being sarcastic or mean to those people (I say people because it isn’t just the girls)…
The upside to Facebook is that we are able to get to know interesting people that we would otherwise not be very acquainted with. For example, the event organizer that I’ve worked with for the All Souls Procession the past 4 years is a really cool guy—he’s a fisherman in Alaska in the late spring-summer, then he flies down to coordinate the Day of the Dead in downtown Tucson during the fall, and right now he’s studying massage therapy in Thailand. People like this, who find a way to follow their dreams and enjoy life, give me hope that being a real grown up might not totally suck. Facebook is a way for us to create virtual support networks of people who inspire us, even though we would not know them well without this media.
Facebook indeed has transformed ways of communication. It seems that when people are adding people that they would not normally talk to Facebook suddenly becomes a competition to befriend the most people as much as possible. It also comes to a point where people start even adding random people they haven't even met in real life. I can say that Facebook has both a negative and a positive side. It has the ability for people that are far away from each other to connect but it leads to people being less interactive to the people around you. You can research pros and cons and come to a conclusion at the end.
ReplyDeleteTo me this seems like a difficult paper to work on, just because it seems like it will require a lot of research. You'll have to find a lot of studies and statistics to back up your points about the effects of facebook with factual information. You can also make a lot of inferences and common knowledge claims as well though. Think about common issues that involve the internet and find out how they relate to facebook. Maybe you could mention cyber bullying since that seems to be a pretty big topic now. That's just one example though, there are probably many more topics you could talk about.
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