Social Networking Affecting Society

Abstract:

Over the past few years, there has been an enormous boom in communication methods. One of most beneficial has been social networking which has exploded in popularity among teenagers, professionals and people living away from home. However, some people have misused social networking. Infant predators, identity thefts and others similar individuals have raised a big concern among society about social networking.

Introductory Paragraphs:

Since the beginning social networking sites have attracted several types of users, and in most cases, these people have incorporated these websites into their daily practices. While some sites support existing relationships, others help creating new relationships in different interests such as political views, religious, activities or even just gaming!

While supporting that the impact of social networking in today's society is beneficial, I have found several factors that go against it, such as cyber bulling. Indeed, social networking provides society a lot of good tools, nonetheless society have taken social networking for granted.

Early Overview:

The intention of this report is to provide a conceptual and informative context about the benefit and harmfulness of social networking in today's society. We begin by exposing some of the benefits of social networking, for instance communication with relatives and family, business networking, advertising. Following this, we'll go over the facts that cause harm to society through social networking such as sexual predators, identity theft, & health related issues. To conclude, based on different articles and general research, we'll identify if social networking is beneficial or harmful to today's society.

Literature Review:

After exploring different sources such as internet articles and magazines, I have found that social networking plays a very important role in today's society. People use social networking to their own advantage, some of them for good or for fun, but unfortunately others use it just to create trouble and harm to the world.

Many of the articles I researched imply that social networking helps to keep relationships feed, despite of distances or circumstances. Also, I came across with a variety of cases where parents claim that their children have improved their writing and reading skills since they started interacting more with computers. Furthermore, social networking could be used as a method of keep educating and updating you in any topic. Not only universities and educational institutes are offering "online classes" but also you could find "virtual" rooms of discussion and know people's opinion around the world, which I find it very useful in different fields such as educational and professional. On the other hand, some people state that social networking is harmful because cases of identity theft, sexual predators after children, and cyber bulling have been the result of social networking. Moreover, since social networking is such as wide "world", people tend to change their beliefs, political opinions or even their life style with the purpose of "fitting" into a certain group. In some cases, users may experience emotional disorders such as depression because they (especially young individuals) feel rejected by certain people or group.

Subsequent to doing study on social networking, I concluded that people who determine social networking as harmful is because they might have based their opinions on assumptions and have not have the chance of utilizing it to their benefit.

Data Sources:

In order to obtain direct research about the impact of social networking in today's society, I conducted a survey on a group of people, whose results were very similar.

After asking neutral questions to this group of people, it has been stated that people spend approximately 2 to 6 hours daily surfing the Internet. The most common social network site they use is "Facebook" followed by "Twitter". Their main purpose of their usage of these websites is to communicate with friends and family as well as business. Just one of the participants uses these websites as an educational tool. The information they share and what they are interested in is very similar. For instance, gossiping and finding out what people in their network is up to is one of the main reasons why they joined these websites. The good outcome of this is that they only share that type of information with people they actually know. It's not public to any one that desires to find out about them. In addition, the group of age that is the most influenced by these social networking sites is teenagers, followed by young people between the ages of 20-30 years old.

In conclusion, I have found that most people use it for their own benefit and a way of communication. The majority of the people have the feeling that social networking is beneficial to society because it reunites old friends and family members in a manner of seconds. It helps to keep in touch and build up stronger relationships.

Main body:

Communicating with the world.

One of the main reasons and most popular because people use social networking sites is to keep in touch with friends and relatives while they are away. It aids the fact that several people who live away from their home receive continuous support from friends and people they communicate through Internet. According to a website article (ProCon.org, Page 2), 60 million of Americans received assistance with major life issues from people on their social network. "These people said social networking sites helped them connect with friends and experts who assisted on their decisions" (ProCon.org, Page 2). With the technology developed by social networking, long distance communication has become much simpler and accessible to the average person, it even "helps low-income populations become more familiar with computers and related technology" (ProCon.org, Page 2). It has facilitated users to keep up with the face-to-face relationship with their friends and relatives. Not only it facilitates the "virtual" contact between its users, but also it can be a technique to arrange personal meetings for different purposes.

Taking into account the features social networking offers, it is also considered as a very potential tool that has even substitute traditional methods of communication. "During the protests