We are living in an evolved world of communication. The evolution of technology gave people power to communicate without seeing the recipient nor the sender face to face. Moreover, socializing in the internet gave many people friends though they don’t know them. In this case, the private life of each individuals are being publicize online. Many negative feedbacks are being thrown to online social networks because of misuse of their users. The end result will be cyber wars because of the thoughts being thrown one to another. However, if we will use the features of these social networks online, we will gain benefits from them.
We have a lot of friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter. Majority of our friends in these sites are not personally socializing with us but we do on chats and video calls. This is one of the benefit of these sites. For example, if you are a student and have colleagues in your project, you can use Facebook as a communication tool. You don’t need to meet your colleagues very often just to collaborate on the projects you and your colleagues are working in, thus, saving you more time. Another example is like students that are studying in foreign countries who are using these networks to communicate with their parents to ease their longing and also to ask for provisions that they need. Likewise, parents that are working abroad that uses these social sites in order to contact their families overseas. Also, we must see these sites as sea of information wherein we can collaborate with the ideas of our friends online, for example, if you have an assignment you can post or tweet it to your friends and ask for their thoughts about your assignment. Not all might reply but you will get sufficient information for those who know the answer to your question. You can then elaborate their answers and cite them to have more information for your works or assignments.
Facebook and Twitter might help the students if they will use it properly as discussed above. It will bring organization to a certain group of students if it will be used properly. One of the organizations that students are included is the college where they will know what path they will take for their future. College’s standards are high making many students work hard to get a diploma. Some of the colleges want to receive more and produce more. However, colleges gave high standards and high demands on students giving them hard time to get the diploma in easier way.
The idea of McDonaldization by George Ritzer gave some insights of how an institution like college works and how it’s been used to organize the group. There are four dimensions of McDonaldization. First is efficiency wherein the best method of completing a task is being used in shorter timeframe. This is the reason why you can’t work alone with your researches and projects in college because you need colleagues to be efficient. Second is calculability which means quantity is more favored than quality. For example, some of the institutions are preferring to produce more graduate students even if their standards are not being met just to say that they have produce many professionals for the nation. Third is predictability which products are in its standard form. For example, students are reaching their grades and be graduated. Institutions are giving standards in order for the students to reach for them to graduate on what the institutions would like them to become, in other word, uniformity. Lastly, control which gives the head of organization to appoint human labor to its subjects. For example, there are clubs in colleges that are doing some jobs within the campus without being paid because it’s their responsibility. Otherwise, if the job is being paid to students then it will be paid less because the institution will admit the students in their scholarship programs, thus, the student’s work is just their duty (McDonaldization).
There are also side effects of McDonaldization which are not good like irrationality, deskilling, and consumer workers (McDonaldization) which in fact being seen within colleges. Even if campus’ life in college is not that easy and students might get psychological breakdown, they are all adapting to it. Thanks to social networking sites because they can use it as pastime, also, to socialize even if it’s impossible because of the scarcity of time.
Work Cited
McDonaldization. What is McDonaldization? n.d. Web. 18 December, 2014. <http://www.mcdonaldization.com/whatisit.shtml>
