Is Facebook a Waste of Time? 1
Is Facebook a waste of time?
Chinonso Oreoluwayemi Uko
UKOCD1801
International college of Manitoba
Mrs. Karen Soiferman
Thursday 7th June,2018.
Essay Number: 1
Social media is a platform on the internet used to share and connect with other users or viewers almost instantly. Social media can be tracked back to one website alone called Six Degrees, launched in 1997. From this, the internet transformed into an outlet for instant messaging and blogging that can almost do everything from sites that allow users to share photos, to being able to meet new people and connect with old friends. It has become a major part of how people communicate with one another, keep up with the latest trends, be it fashion or music as well as memes, and basically connect with the world around them. Everyone knows and uses social media, even in the most rural part of the world, word of Facebook and Twitter has reached there, and they probably use it everyday too, however, it was not like this a decade ago where major forms of communication where through phone calls or texts messages, not a lot of people had internet access at the time and smartphones were not available for purchase. Some platforms are more popular than others, but each platform has a targeted audience, no matter how small, e.g. Instagram is for an audience that communicates through photographs and videos, while Twitter is perfect for those who communicate their messages straight to the point. Facebook started out as a Harvard only social networking site in 2004, it quickly began to spread to other universities, the to high school, business and became worldwide by 2006, in 2008 it became the most popular social networking site and it continues to grow. Although Facebook has grown in popularity, it has been faced with growing controversy and criticism, like the fact that it can be used by stalkers, child predators; and, social media sites open privacy and security concerns, Facebook is a social media site that gives (easy) access to worldly dangers, making it a waste of time.
Facebook and other social media sites have become notorious for making it easier for stalkers to track their victims and even find new ones, this proves that many young users of Facebook are within the grasps of being stalked and lured into giving money out or worse off meeting or giving out home addresses to these awful people. Unfortunately, it’s not only strangers that do this stalking, it could well be people we know and probably cut off like an ex friend who seemed suspicious or an ex that had been broken up with but does not want to move on and it is quite shocking as 7 in 10 victims know their offender in some capacity. According to the National Centre for Victims of Crime, “1,006,970 women and 370,000 men are stalked annually in the United States.” Stalking itself seems like a harmless/victimless crime, but when this turns into interactions that begin to scare people, then harmless view...
