Social Networking

Technologies involved in social networking have more ways of using, and they influenced our lives more sharply than we assumed. Technologies involved in social networking not only bring convenience but also improved our mental capacity while using the technologies. The term 'unfriend' is developed by Facebook, where it has an option that says 'unfriend' and serves as the button to terminate one's online friendship with another. As Doug Cross states in his article 'Dictionary word of the year: 'Unfriend' ', 'Facebook spokeswoman Meredith Chin said that, both internally and on the site, Facebook uses several terms for the act of removing a friend. She said site managers now are considering making "unfriend" the official term.' This option on our Facebook pages have given us opportunities to remove one person from our lives, sometimes reality doesn't encourage us of doing so. The button that says 'unfriend' gives easier and faster access to the end of the friendship. Which turns out to be a great example for the improvement of our psychological capacity. In Virginia Heffernan's article 'Being There', it's easy to tell that social networking such as Facebook has provided many youngsters to share their opinions on a public platform, which is what they desired, to have more people listen to their heart. The process of making posts and share them on the internet itself is very personal and involved lots of self analysis, but the outcome is usually better than what we speak out loud, because the latter one involved less thinking and self-correction. Therefore, to sum up, the benefits social networking bring are huge and improve many aspects of human life onto a different level, it not enhance psychological capacity, but also provide a platform to exchange opinions. 


However, there always comes a dark side of social networking. Privacy is always an important issue related with social networking. Every people go online frequently is under the risk of exposing privacy, once taking this possibility into count, social networking can be very dangerous. I think there should have been some laws ( or even more laws) indicating the violation of privacy laws is harmful to both the one who was exposed and the one who was exposing.