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Introduction
Social networking sites are ubiquitous, and the father of all these sites known as Facebook has incessantly gained popularity among students, working people and even individuals who are merely staying home. It has become effective in marketing its usage that most people spend most of their time in the social networking site. This site reached its main objective of encouraging people to connect with their love ones, regardless of their location, update their profile to inform everyone of what is happening in your life and even establish connection with other people with same interest and hobbies. With the number of likes and uncontrolled responses from friends and friends of friends, unknowingly, this results to getting hook with the site itself and actively exposing almost everything that happens to an individual every now and then. Sometimes, there are not so nice comments received from people, and this also pushes Facebook users to defend themselves and react to it, thus, making an individual egoistic and self-involved .
Facebook has several rich features that make people want to go back to it. It’s ‘friending’ capability or its ability to connect with other people, regardless of your relationship, and categorize them permits users to access your full profile. Its wall, also known as the timeline, allow posting of pictures, messages and events in an individual’s life, is accessible to all of the friends of the users. With whatever your friends are seeing in your timeline or your wall, they may either like or make a comment about it. Beyond this, there is the usual message, notification and inbox where friends can directly email you, or received a notice that someone wants to make friends with you or informing of the upcoming birthday. All of these features when combined eat most of your time that it makes your life more available online than your usual interaction. Studies show that using Facebook brings forth various impacts to its users. Some users claim that using Facebook and updating themselves about the latest situation of their friends through their own walls influence how they perceive other people . Based on the pictures taken from various places and people laughing and having a great time, some Facebook users think that their friends are happier and have better lives than they have. As a result, some Facebook users make inference that their life is not as good as the other because of what they are seeing. Some users tend to become too self-absorbed, especially when they received positive responses and thousand likes, that they appear that their life evolve around the social networking site. On the other hand, because their friends see that everything seems good with others, this result to jealousy not only to current status of their friend’s lives but also to sexual and romantic relationships exposed in Facebook .
Given this, this research intends to explore the value of Facebook to its users and its impact on their respective lives. This study will also investigate how the use of the social networking sites lead to narcissism and being self-involved with its overtime use. Lastly, this study will provide recommendation on addressing the negative implication and taking advantage of using Facebook.
Work Cited
Chou, H.-T. G., & Edge, N. (2012). They are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Other's Lives. CyberPsychology, Behavior and Social Networking vol.15, no.2 , 117-121.
Muise, A., Christofides, E., & Desmarais, S. More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy. Canada: Department of Psychology, University of Guelph.
Ong, E., Ang, R., Ho, J., Lim, J., Goh, D., & Lee, C. (2011). Narcissism, extraversion and adolescent's self-presentation on Facebook. Personality and Differences vol.50 , 180-185.
