Facebook Addiction Essay

Facebook has come to be probably the most commonly used social networking site, nearly half of Facebook’s users view their profiles every day. Some of the users spend an unreasonable amount of their time on Facebook, whiling the hours away unnoticed, while chores to go unfinished, and even going to the extent of ignoring family and friends in the real world. Although a majority of the hundreds of millions of people use Facebook as a social networking device, it has several of negative impacts such as social isolation, communication problems, and health problems which profoundly impact the lives of the users. While Facebook addiction disorder or Facebook addiction are not medically accepted terms, the actuality of addictive behavior on Facebook is a mounting concern for scores of Facebook users, and one that psychoanalysts are seeing more regularly in their patients. According to Fenichel, if you have found that sharing, connecting and learning through Facebook has replaced all avenues of learning and communicating and in your life, it is a possibility that you have Facebook addiction Disorder. Negative Effects of Facebook  Facebook reduces the amount of time spent with significant people in one’s life through frequent checking of profile updates and statuses. Facebook can result to relationship problems as it exposes one’s social life, for instance pictures of ex boyfriends and girlfriends or flirting messages may cause tension in relationships. That is all part of exposing your life on a social networking website. The use of Facebook can also cause problems at work with frequent checking of status updates during work time. This may lead to misunderstandings between the management and staff. This is what has led to many organizations banning Facebook from working places. Facebook leads to procrastination as Facebook addicts find themselves too busy to attend to important and urgent matters due to being online chatting, updating statuses and commenting on other people’s pictures. Facebook has been in the news several times over issues of privacy. Facebook makes it easy for people to access information about other people from their profiles as a majority of users tend to give out all their information on their profiles. This can result to issues of surveillance and hacking. On health issues, Facebook leads to eye strain due to the amount of time spent online on the computer (Thompson). Facebook as a new phenomenon is here to stay, however, as this paper has shown, a lot of care needs to be taken in the use of it in people’s everyday lives. Facebook has negative effects on a person’s life which cannot be taken lightly. This paper has also shown that although Facebook addiction is a serious matter. However, it is not all doom and gloom as there are viable remedies which can be employed in order to overcome Facebook addiction. Facebook is a big time waster During the first decade of the 21st century a popular and new word has come into our vocabulary. That word is Facebook. This is the most popular social networking website on the internet. If you haven’t heard about Facebook until reading this, then you must have been in a coma for the last 5 years. There are about 350 million active users on this website. The main idea of Facebook is that you can keep in touch with all your friends around the world who has Facebook. You can send messages to your friend’s electronic wall, put up a status saying something like â€Å"Going to the mall, need to get a new pair of shoes† or â€Å"it’s finally the weekend! )†. In the 350 million users on Facebook, 67% of them are between the ages of 13 -25. More than 35 million users update their status every day. 2. 5 billion Photos are added each month. The highest age groups who use Facebook are teenagers. Most of them keep the website running whenever they are using the computer and general teens nowadays are always on the computer, if they aren’t in school/college or when they aren’t asleep. I feel that teens should be focused on their school work or be socializing with their friends in person or exercising. Facebook is just changing the new generation of youngsters completely because the teenage life is one of the most important stages of life and wasting it on Facebook is not encouraging this in anyway. It is also a complete distraction to their mind; like nowadays when all their homework and research are on ICT, they would get diverted into Facebook just to check if there was anything updated among their friends. Remember back in the good old days, when teens would do their homework handwritten, play sports and hang out with friends. Today, most teens would only speak to their friends on Facebook, while we can see them battling obesity as they stare at their friend’s message on their wall. In summary, teens don’t have a life because they are on Facebook 24/7, except for those who don’t use Facebook or occasionally do. Facebook is also where people can see the gossip among their friends, virtual arguments, relationship status and updates, who is in whose ‘top friends’, you can become fan of anything, join groups, post pictures and videos, play juvenile games, invite friends to parties or events and a heap more. Mainly, all this would just disturb people into living life to their fullest. It’s not just teens who become addicted even grownups do. An average person spends about 55 minutes on Facebook. This statistic isn’t that bad but some people spend about 3-5 hours. Technology might be taking over people’s lives. The internet is what the youth does almost all the time and other growing social networking sites such as Twitter might become the next Facebook.