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Blogging, facebook, internet, myspace, pinterest, social good, social media, social networking, tumblr, twitter
Social Media has been blamed for teen depression, poor grades, crime, identity theft, data mining, censorship, divorce, envy, bullying, defamation, anti-semitism, and pretty much everything else.
In fact, if Facebook hadn’t been launched three years too late, I’m sure someone would have linked it to September 11th by now.
But the fact remains that in a few short years, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have become so popular that they even get their own verbs.
Facebook, being the most popular social media company out there, tends to be the social media scapegoat, much the way that McDonald’s is the scapegoat for the fast food industry. They get blamed for everything the most.
Maybe it’s because nearly a billion people use Facebook to some extent and it bothers us that one company owns information on that many human beings.
Maybe it’s because breastfeeding photos are taken down, but holocaust denial groups and pro-anorexia boards thrive.
Maybe it’s because no one is entirely sure they understand their own privacy settings.
Maybe it’s because we want this excellent method of sharing our information with others to be (paradoxically) completely private.
Maybe it’s just that there’s something creepy and Big-Brotherish about Facebook and its ilk.
We are sure that all of this online sharing of information must be bad. Anything this addictive can’t be good.
Social Media is frequently labelled as the the downfall of true human interaction.
Studies have found that teens who use Facebook a lot are much more likely to be depressed, have lower grades, and all sorts of other problems in their lives. We talk a lot about how much social media is changing our world, and we’re pretty sure it’s for the worse.
We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.” – Stephen Marche, The Atlantic
But I disagree.
I think it could save the world.