Our time is the age of information technology, computers, the Internet, bigger and bigger illusions isolated from reality. Every year, people go deeper and deeper into the virtual computer world, forgetting the one that gave life to them. This electronic world for many people has replaced the real a long time ago, as well as virtual communication with the machine began to prevail over the direct human communication. The modern person is less and less in interaction with people and nature, giving it up for the virtual spaces of the computer world. Virtual communication, virtual thinking, virtual nature, virtual world, farms, castles, cities, love, and even virtual sex, and eventually the virtual life that has no meaning. That is how computers are slowly taking away our friends, loved ones, and in the modern world, even mothers and fathers, and these people have lives.
In this essay, I want to talk a little bit about the virus that captured the whole world and pulled into a virtual reality - it is so beloved by many social networks. Personally I am a user of social networks, which is why it is very important for me to understand what I should beware and what features I can use safely. The focus of the paper is the fact that social networks limit human interaction and pose a strong threat to people’s privacy. In my point of view, people should abandon social networking and go out, communicate more often. Social networking affects our privacy as it takes away the need for us from interacting face to face and it weakens family ties.
First, I want to describe briefly the history of social networking. The term social network was introduced in 1954 by sociologist from the Manchester School – James Barnes in "The classes and meetings in Norwegian island parish”. Before this time, many thinkers have expressed their opinion about the society, the importance of dealing with society as a complex network of relationships. The concept of "social network" in the second half of the XX century has acquired great popularity among the Western scholars of society. A person is a social being, and he began to communicate before learning how to talk. It is possible to say that the first social network were the fires that fueled the ancient to report hazards. There were two people – they can be considered as the tops of the network, and the fires - a communication channel. Later there were pigeons, letters, telegraphs, and telephones. With the birth of the TCP/IP protocol stack in the 1980s, there was a network of Internet, and the channel became digital.
As a subject of research, the social network concept of is being developed in sociology. Sociologists explain this term in different ways, but agree on one thing: social network is a type of relationship of people one with another (Patchin and Hinduja 201). Social networks differ from the unbound set, where there are no connections between people, and from the hierarchical relations. In social networks there are no superiors and subordinates, everything rests on the personal will of the people. In reality, social network is any group of people united by common interests. The main thing in it is mutual peer communication of one person with others. With the advent of the Internet, they were transferred there, and have become very popular. If in society social networks are formed spontaneously, in the Internet it is necessary to purposefully create them, usually for economic gain. Social network is the most effective way to keep the attention of the visitor, and thus make a profit from advertising or through hundreds of other ways.
A variety of social networking sites is very popular among all sections of the population and of any age. The original idea of social networks was innocent, because it was aimed at providing the opportunity to communicate for friends and acquaintances who live in different countries, cities, to share photos, ideas, make new contacts, etc. However, if we take a sober look at the situation prevailing around social networks today, we can understand that these good intentions are transformed into quite the opposite. Our movement in step with the time has led us to the dependence on the virtual world. People turn into machines. They start to live a virtual life with virtual communication. This virtual communication is impersonal; it has replaced all the real human feelings and emotions. We started to celebrate the holidays virtually, with a postcard on the walls of friends. It is easier to communicate with people through correspondence, than to meet them in person. Children play games with friends over the internet, too, and not in the yard building barricades, drawing roads or building sand castles. All of this migrated to the world of illusion, depriving people of joy from interacting with the real world that is so beautiful, and the children of their childhood.
A person when communicating in text format simply loses the ability to interact harmoniously with people in the real world. Communicating with a person face-to-face needs attention, the ability to listen, understand, maintain a conversation, establish friendly relations, motivate the interlocutor, control speech and emotions, as well as express thoughts through speech in a fast and clear way for the interlocutor, to find compromises, defend opinions and peacefully settle conflicts. The more a person goes into the virtual world, the stronger ability to complete live communication and the ability to behave in society becomes atrophied. After all, live communication skills online are not required, and they gradually die away, according to the law acting in this world - all of that is not being used - dies. We are created so that the real pleasure of life and development can be obtained only through direct interaction with other people, and not through the screen. It is not difficult to guess what problems in all areas of life can be caused by virtual communication; it is the collapse of the individual.
Online romance became the cause of every third divorce. All of this because the number of affairs that have occurred because of online social networks in the past few years has increased by 2.5 times. Many family quarrels happen due to "accidental" reading of the correspondence of a partner with friends in social network. That is not all, because almost a third of people are engaged in psychological exhibitionism, posting uninteresting pictures of their personal life. All this leads to inadequate perception of reality, and as a consequence an increase in the number of suicides and sexual crimes against minors (Livingstone and Brake 78). Shallow posts from day to day limit our mind, which leads to the breakdown of intelligence. Finally, engaging in virtual communication and lack of real communication is bad for the immune system, as it disrupts hormonal balance, work of the arteries and the thought processes and a person slowly degrades at all levels.
People who are fond of social networks just stop being themselves and live in the real world, they lose their emotions, "hang out" in the networks for days and nights, ignoring housework, their personal and spiritual development, and simply fail to respond to those around them in real life and every day become more and more shallow.
It is time to admit that we are hopelessly fused with social networks (Foulger et al. 25). With the development of mobile technologies, mankind is giving even more than before time not just communicating in the various services, but also infinite editing their data, sharing pictures, statuses, quotes and other protrusion of self and fleeting view completely useless information. It seems to be okay, but most people do not notice and do not realize that they spend a lot of time on it, becoming nervous.
If the harm of the social networks is analyzed, the following statements can be made. First, as mentioned above, people become nervous, constantly checking their account for any news, messages, photos and other information, which certainly does not require an immediate reading. Social networks cause rather strong dependence. To the extent when you become afraid to miss some important news or message.
Second, it takes a lot of time, a lot more than people think. During the time while people are viewing recent posts in groups, photos, statuses, etc., they could do many useful things, walk, work, read, take the time to close people (Cain 10). Third, over time people’s ability to keep the attention on one thing, the concentration is decreasing. In the middle of the working process, you can easily escape to a newsfeed, post some status, and get involved in another intense argument. Focusing on one process, for example, at work, becomes each time more difficult.
Fourth, people can regularly be jealous because of "activities" of their beloved ones in the social networks. Who got into such a situation will understand it – likes of other people's photos, notes, correspondence with members of the opposite sex, opening accounts and many other interesting things are waiting for people, who abuse the social networks with particular zeal.
Fifth, the social network can make you envy even if it was not typical of you before. All of these tons of pictures from the category of "look how good I am" for several years, can make you reflect on people’s own achievements more often (Nosko, Wood and Molema 410).
Sixth, all of this could ultimately lead to the fact that people meet less with their friends and acquaintances - the ability to communicate online, envy, jealousy, reflection and other factors can significantly reduce the social circle and turn people into an online addict. Finally, the seventh - you can earn a lot of other problems, when someone gets more popular than you, when people put more likes to other photos and so on. The best way out is definitely the following: get rid of the addiction, go for a walk.
Works Cited
Cain, Jeff. “Online Social Networking Issues Within Academia and Pharmacy Education.” American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 72.1 (2008): 10. Web. 26 Apr. 2013.
Foulger, Teresa S., et al. “Moral Spaces in MySpace: Preservice Teachers’ Perspectives about Ethical Issues in Social Networking.” Journal of Research on Technology in Education 42.1 (2009): 1-28. Web 26 Apr. 2013.
Livingstone, Sonia and David R. Brake. “On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites: New Findings and Policy Implications.” Children & Society 24.1 (2010): 75–83. Web 27 Apr. 2013.
Nosko, Amanda, Eileen Wood and Seija Molema. “All about me: Disclosure in online social networking profiles: The case of FACEBOOK.” Computers in Human Behavior 26.3 (2010): 406–418. Web. 25 Apr. 2013.
Patchin, Justin W. and Sameer Hinduja. “Trends in online social networking: adolescent use of MySpace over time.” New Media & Society 12.2 (2010): 197-216. Web 27 Apr. 2013.
