The Effect of Facebook on Family - Essay Example

Facebook’s Effect on Family Table of Contents Communication with the family 2 Less interaction with family 3 Privacy Concern and Parental Stalking 5 Works Cited 7 Facebook’s Effect on Family As we all are living in the digital age, social networking is the new phenomena that people; specifically teens and young adults are getting addicted to as they are the generation that is computer and technology friendly and can easily adhere to digital social media yet a lot of adults even use it regularly and are gripped to it. Communication with the family According to a lot of people Facebook is a blessing for them since it has made their lives easier in order to socially interact with their friends, families and colleagues. They do not have to physically visit them rather they keep in touch with them digitally via Facebook. It provides them the ease of being in touch with their loved ones living in distant areas in order to overcome this hassle as they keep their families updated with the recent happenings taking place in their lives. For instance, the so called how are you conversations are substituted with the status updates as one would be well aware of what their family members and friends were up to a few hours before, also posting pictures of different events and occasions increases the interest level of the person’s social network. Moreover, a lot of parents are obsessed and connected via different gaming applications such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker where they have fun spending time with communicating with their children (Myron, 2010). Furthermore, it removes the hindrance of being hesitant or conscious while chatting with friends or girlfriends/boyfriends since it gets difficult to discuss certain things face to face but via digital Facebook chats they can easily get their messages communicated and develop their conversations to a deeper extent than in face to face interaction. Likewise, lot of people have their good friends migrated to other states and countries but they really do not even miss each other as they are of the view that they are going to regularly be in touch via Facebook throughout the week (Facebook: Its Impact on Us and on Society, 2009). Alternatively, it not only helps them to keep in touch with their family members or current friends but it also has an amazing feature of a friend finder; where finding one’s old school friends and peers who were at one point of time together. All this is just a few fingertips away where different details of the desired person are submitted and one can easily search their old friends. Moreover, it even allows people to increase their social network by meeting new people online and built strong relationships with them be it professional or personal, as one’s overall information starting from their gender to the religion they believe in and the country/state they live in are all really beneficial sources of information that is provided under one platform of Facebook. This is the reason why Facebook is known as the 6th most populated country as huge number of people from all over the world are hooked on to Facebook and are happy socializing. Therefore, the era of pen pals has long gone now and people prefer gossips, discussions and personal relationships to be enhanced via Facebook as one of their most preferred mediums (Agnes, pp. 23-25). Less interaction with family Conversely, talking about the myth of getting technology dependent, it is of major concern that nowadays people prefer spending their walking time online too. It is not a good sign since we all are becoming slaves of the digital media and technology and our health’s getting affected since we are mostly found surfing these social networking websites specifically Facebook. Parents are also deeply concerned regarding the laziness and non-productivity of their kids since all they do is spend long hours socializing online with their friends via Facebook where they are even avoiding their family members. It is very likely that in future the young generation would fall victims of many health related diseases at a very young age since now the act of socializing is also done via digital means due to the existence of Facebook and people avoid personal face to face interaction and prefer the virtual social interaction (Barnes, pp. 1-5). Another thing that is of parent’s concern is that their children have the tendency of being a victim of different social pressures and they could indulge into activities where their kids are free of be someone what they are not in actual and eventually fall the victim of mental depressions due to the myth of identity distortion. Furthermore, the relationships with their children would suffer as they are getting distant from interacting with their parents and staying online on Facebook for long hours. Also the probability of the teenager’s exploitation; the activities that they would be indulged into due to this digital social network could get troublesome for parents to tackle, since different undue demands could occur from their children (Sebastián, pp. 49-52). Therefore, to overcome this dilemma of keeping their children technology oriented even in the case of socializing, parents should encourage their children to organize or participate in different academic or fun events where they could interact with their friends physically (Barnes, pp. 1-5). Events such as birthday parties, leadership conferences and club events etc could be different persuading techniques and for that their kids could create hype via Facebook events and all their friends could be invited and notified about the venue details etc. Moreover, parents could even encourage their kids to socialize with people online via Facebook in a productive manner by offering some entrepreneurial services involving their friends too, in order to spread the word of mouth to the right target market so that the parents are of the opinion that their kids are at least able to groom and enhance their skills personally as well as professionally which is really beneficial for personal development. This way the kids would also discuss their anecdotes with their parents too and seek for their guidance and appreciation which would help motivate them and boost their self esteem and self-confidence. Nevertheless, the parents would also be proud of their kids at the same time (Barnes, pp. 1-5). Privacy Concern and Parental Stalking Another concern for parents about stalking their kids have become in order to ensure they are interacting with the right people and are not caught up into any controversies. On the other hand, kids feel insecure about their privacy as they feel conscious and even embarrassed amongst their friends since they are victims of different jokes that their friends’ plant which in turn has a total negative influence on them (Sebastián, pp. 49-52). With the emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook, teenagers and most of the young adults freely give out their private and intimate information online without knowing about its consequences. According to experts (Barnes, pp. 19-22), the altitudinal results of the undergraduates of giving out their personal information were really neutral due to the reason that they trust the people with whom they interact via Facebook. There can be different consequences or controversies one can fall victim of; for e.g. students who carelessly share their drinking and fraternity pledging photos with their friends on social networking sites are perhaps not aware of the consequences taken by their university’s administration to utilize those images as a mean of substantiation to reprimand student behavior and ultimately the parent would be in utter shock and also be ashamed of their kids getting penalized by their academic’s authorities. Therefore, in order to overcome different issues that could occur if given too much of privacy to teenagers and young adults, it is to be taken into consideration that a moderate level of parental stalking should exist as they are the primary source who could easily influence their kids. Hence, different efforts should be made by the schools/universities in order to educate students regarding the logical explanation of parents stalking them, as they are possessive about their children’s security and want the betterment of their children (Barnes, pp. 1-5). Moreover, schools have also started to take an initiative in order to defend the security of young individuals in social networking sites as they are they are aware of their social responsibilities to. Therefore, schools have started to imply a few social network policies that would monitor the student’s activities on these social networking sites since the information that is being given out by the student is publicly shared (Sebastián, pp. 49-52). Interestingly, schools have even taken an initiative of co-coordinating with the parents by regularly updating them about the activities of their kids where the principals regularly follow up with parents via calls, personal e-mails etc in order to take the parents into confidence and provide them with the information regarding the intensity of personal information that their kids have put up on the internet which could backfire them. Currently, in social networks, privacy is still not of a big deal and still a lot of people do not understand the probabilities of misuse of their personal information rather it is to be taken into consideration that the protection of children against predators is necessary, which is the only solution to the privacy paradox. Most importantly, “awareness is the key to solving the solution. We, as individuals need to be more proactive” (Barnes, pp. 1-5). Although the solution to the paradox is not simple, but it would gradually be adopted that require all levels of society to tackle the social issues related to teens and privacy regarding educating each other and protecting our privacy on the internet. Works Cited Agnes. Some Advantages of Facebook, 2008. Retrieved on Dec 2, 2010, from http://www.socialmediawatch.net: http://www.socialmediawatch.net/index.php/social-media-watch/1356/ Barnes, S. B. A privacy paradox, Social Networkin in US. First Monday, 2006. Facebook: Its Impact on Us and on Society, 2009. Retrieved on Dec 1, 2010, from www.ists.dartmouth.edu: http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/events/facebook-itsimpact.html Myron, G. One Big Online Family, 2010. Retrieved on December 1, 2010, from www.demodirt.com: http://www.demodirt.com/index.php/us-trends/family-and-relationships/443-one-big-online-family Sebastián, V. N. Lessons from Facebook: The Effect of Social Network. Austin-Texas, 2008. Read More