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I can't imagine what its like to be a teenager now with all this. So much drama around a social network.
I'm not on Facebook, but from I have heard, it's a wonderful thing for the cliquey teenagers. You know, the kids in high school who took great delight in spreading rumors, ridiculing, bullying, and ostracizing other kids for not being cool enough to join their exclusive clique. Now they can do it on a massive scale, with photos, video and long ranting posts filled with pain and ridicule.
I know how mean some kids can be, and there have been news stories of this type of behavior, I just wonder how wide spread it is.
It was bad enough when I was a teenager. I'd see some poor kid being teased and bullied. Kids have short attention spans, and many times the kid that picked on you when you were younger may become a friend later on in school. Back then the memory of those childish antics faded away and all was forgotten. I have to wonder how it is for kids today, when the mean things said and done to them remain on Facebook and never go away.
I could not agree more... I feel sorry for kids today and would not trade my childhood in the 80's for any amount of money to grow up today
Amen to that! Our technology was Nintendo. It seems like over the past 5-6 years there's been an enormous amount of pressure put on kids. If you're not part of the "in-crowd" now the whole world knows it thanks to twitter, fb, youtube. Remember the girls in Florida that beat-up the other girl then put the video on youtube? I mean WTF! That's why I applaud the dad that shot up his daughter's lap-top. It's almost like kids aren't allowed to be kids anymore, which is sad
I simply could no longer stand getting stupid updates, invites, and other crap from people I hadn't really known in years. Those I was (and am) truly friends with certainly have other means of staying in touch with me.
In other words, I didn't see any value in it - at least for me. Obviously, whatever is posted is of great value to advertisers.
I agree. Now there are studies that show that Facebook causes depression because people assume their friends are doing so much better than them or are living better lives based on their updates. People post the stuff worth "bragging" about and hide the bad stuff.
I can't imagine what its like to be a teenager now with all this. So much drama around a social network.
"@ people who log off facebook....haha ur a loooooser!!!!"
Okay, sorry, bad attempt at humor. Anyway, here's my FB story and experience:
When I first joined FB in 2008, I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought it was another Myspace and I frankly wasn't interested because Myspace was just too cartoonish and goofy and I didn't see the point of sticking with it when my two 'friends' weren't on it either. But then I found FB to be so simple and easy to use, and it was easy to make connections with people. I quickly found it easy to keep in touch with friends I had moved away from and lost contact with. Like others, I wasn't really sure whom to add and whom not to, but I ended up adding lots of people, including some I wasn't really all that interested in talking with, but i was just curious to know what they were up to. But once you find out where they are, what they're doing...the curiosity quickly fades and then you realize, they're just living a life that's far apart and in no real way connected to yours.
In the meantime, I was now connected to family members that I hadn't seen or heard from in years. Again, it was cool to know what they were up to and that I could communicate with them again after all this time. But again, the curiosity fades and it's back to life as normal. And now I'm not really all that interested in knowing what my cousins that I haven't seen in 15 years are up to. I'm sure they're great people, but they're not part of my life, nor am I a part of theirs. Sorry if that's cold but that's the truth.
I've had a love-hate relationship with FB. I like the convenience of being able to stay in touch with people, but I also feel like it can be a social burden. If you don't log on for a while and miss someone's birthday or don't post or message them, Facebook knows and it keeps a record. The problem with friendships on sites like Facebook is that it keeps score. It's like it's quantifying how popular you are, and it's telling others how good of a friend you are by contributing to the online social world. And then if there are family or friendship issues, it's really awkward to be online at all. It would be so much simpler if people could have some of their privacy back in some ways.
In all seriousness, though, FB and other social media are not going away. They're going to be a part of life in the 21st century whether we want it to be or not. It's a way of staying connected. Being without some sort of social media won't literally end your life, but it will in some ways be equivalent to living without a car, a telephone, or some other means of moving around and staying connected that we now take for granted.
I think social media is here to stay; I just question whether or not it will be the facebook/myspace version of social media that really makes it over the long haul. I'm more inclined to believe that, over time, social networking will have different platforms. I think people will eventually have different 'compartments' of social networks that will serve different functions, and individuals, like they do in real life, will want to keep those compartments separated. They'll have a professional social network like LinkedIN, and then they'll save their other social networks for other purposes. Maybe they'll have a family-only network, a friends only network, and a hobby network. I think that the ultimate evolutionary terminus will be a meta-social networking management tool that allows an individual to drift in and out of different networks seamlessly, allowing multiple, compartmentalized networks that keep people's private lives separated from their work lives but allow for easy flowing back and forth between these networks conveniently. I used to think that FB would be the one-stop shop, but I no longer think that. If anything, it looks like Google 'gets it', and is trying to beat FB to the punch.
This thread is about how Facebook affects the lives of today's adolescent children.
I have a couple teenagers on my friends list...
I gotta say, they seem more mature than some of my 30+ year old friends.
One of them I can tell is a bit skewed because her mom is a facebook ***** though..
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