Facebook is a social networking website that helps to connect people in different places, who could be students, relatives, workers in different places, or people who do not even know one another. One is only required to register and start looking for friends on the network. This seems to be a good and easy connection and it has attracted very many people who have registered and even uploaded their photographs (Boyed 1). However, Facebook has brought about a lot of problems and it is advisable for those who have registered to quit (Ellison, p. 7).
To start with, Facebook has made a lot of marriages and good relationships to break, leaving the involved parties distressed.This mostly happens when a married man comments on something that was shared by a lady on Facebook. The wife, on finding that comment, mistakes her husband to be having an affair with the lady. If that wife then happens to get another person who will discuss that with her in a way suggesting that her husband is unfaithful, she may stop trusting her husband, and it may end up breaking the marriage (Mazer, p. 5).
The same case applies to relationships. Many have argued that Facebook is good because it brings potential marriage partners together. However, in reality, it has killed more marriages and relationships than those it has built. There is therefore no need of bringing people together for marriage and then break them or bring mistrust between them, as it only leaves them more distressed and frustrated.
Some see Facebook as a good thing because it connects people working in different places and helps them to share ideas without having to meet face-to-face. However, if one looks at the other side of the coin, he or she will realize that Facebook has lowered the productivity of many workers by wasting a lot of their valuable time in work places; it has also made many people lose their jobs. This is because an employee using a computer and expecting messages from friends will keep visiting Facebook. That way he or she will have wasted a lot of valuable time at the end of the day. This makes him or her ineffective and inefficient and at the end of it all, he/she may end up losing the job (Mazer, p. 5).
Many have also been attracted to Facebook in the hope that they will be able to interact widely with people and be exposed to many ideas. However they later realize that this is more of a problem than an advantage. This is especially when one receives an irritating message from a person he or she does not know, or when the children are exposed to immoral experiences like pornography. Also, sharing of ideas has brought about social conflicts, where people, especially the youth, get exposed to lifestyles in other countries and decide to adopt them. This at times fails to agree with their home values and brings about conflicts between the young generation and their parents (Mazer, p. 8).
In addition, Facebook has increased crimes like robbery, murder and many others. This is because it is very easy for people organizing robbery or murder to retrieve people’s photographs from Facebook. This has made people organize such crimes successfully without struggle.
Finally, by making people from different countries share and interact, Facebook has given people with ill intentions opportunities to show false love to people in other countries looking for love and lure them into migrating to their countries only to frustrate them at the end of it all. To solve the above problems it is important that people cancel their Facebook accounts.
Works Cited
- Boyed, Danah. Social Network Sites, 2007.
- Ellison, Nicole B., Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe, The benefits of face book, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (4), 2007.
- Mazer, Joseph, Richard Murphy & Cheri Simonds. “I’ll See You On “Face book”: The Effects of Computer-Mediated Teacher Self-Disclosure on Student Motivation, Affective Learning, and Classroom Climate”. Communication Education 56 (1): 1–17; 2007