Social Networking Sites and its Effect on Friending - Research Paper Example

It is also a source of emotional support especially during the events of emotional trials. Friends are also the people needed in times of problems aside from parents and relatives. However, due to the evolution of social media in making friends, the definition of friends has changed and a different meaning had been acquired. Social network sites (SNSs) have many advantages to on line users. For job application or work related issues you can use Likedin.com. When people are looking for people with common interest certain social networks such as Myspace.

com comes to mind. People who are looking for possible partner or wanted to start a relationship can log-in to Friendster.com. For college students for example, social sites such as Facebook.com are used to connect to peers or share school lessons and activities and can also be used to answer queries (Ellison et al., 1143). Social network sites (SNSs) provide an easier approach to different reasons, a cheaper version where a good internet connection and a device or a gadget i.e. personal computer, laptop, mobile phone, tablet or a notebook are needed.

One can gain access to all of these sites wherever and in anytime of the day. A person can also log in on the different sites all at once and multi-task. It provides countless unimaginable opportunities to users such as finding long lost friends and childhood friends who had not been seen in years. Other scenarios are finding the right partner, finding a better job and so on. It makes the process of making friends easier and faster by sending a request and accepting it just by clicking the accept button.

It is a no fuss activity and one can know more about the person connected with by visiting his page and reading its contents such as recent activities, likes, dislikes, pictures posted aside from personal information. It also provides a wider range of network consisting of different people with different degree of physical interaction in one’s day to day life. Facebook which is established in 2004 in Harvard University and made 200 users worldwide as of 2009 has provide a strong link with users’ high school friends that they left behind due to studying college in other places (Lewis J., West A. 1148).

It also provided information on the up to date information of the makers and their friends’ lives. In every new technology discovered, there are always few drawbacks that arise and one of them is giving the word friends a different meaning and context. It also provides a new range or levels of friends when it comes to social network sites. One of the drawbacks of using these media is that they provide new sense to the word friendship with other people. They provide less interaction with them and a shallow definition of it.

According to Allan (1989) as cited by Lewis & West (2009) in real life, there are different sorts of friends; those who are close and those are merely acquaintances. Always acquaintances are grater in number in your friends’ list than your close friends. These acquaintances are people one bump into everyday without having a conversation with each other, a classmate in one of your classes, a group mate in a project and anyone else where a person does not have a significant interaction and does not provide a sense of commitment and emotional support.

Boyd (2006) as cited by Lewis & West (2009 1211), assessment of this relationship has no weight as well as what