Opening Statement: Facebook

I personally feel that social networks such as Facebook are more harmful to society than good. This is because they reduce real communication to emails, instant messaging, and friend requesting. There is no true friendship involved in these types of communication.


The definition of friendship is "friendly feeling or disposition."(dictionary.com). In a friendship, you communicate feeling, such as happiness. Friendship cannot exist without feeling. On a social network, there is no way to communicate true feeling. Everything is covered up by the screen in front of you. There is no way of seeing or feeling true emotion. Instead, people use emoticons such as ":D, :(." That is not an emotion. I feel that this lack of emotion could potentially be a source of communication breakdown in the future. Society could possibly base friendship off of technology rather than a "true" friendship. 


Besides a breakdown of communication, I also feel that a breakdown of the English language could potentially occur. With current generations of social network users, "text language" is the popular choice of communication. Many are too lazy to put thought, feeling, or time into what they write. Instead, they choose to write abbreviations, and words that are not in the English language. Words such as "ttul, brb, lol, smh" ect. are used. Currently, I have even heard some people say "lol" along with other words in person; this signifies an extreme cutdown on lack of communication. 


If you ever talk to parents about social networks, they usually always tell you to "be careful." This is because of "online predators" that participate in these networks. They can be anyone, from an old man, to a young adult. The problem is they have no good intentions while on these internet sites. Their intention is to look for little girls/guys for their own reasons. Predators make online socializing dangerous. Many people carelessly become friends with random people. This leads to issues.


Social networks create problems in the society we live in. They stop true communication, and allow for  online predidatoin. These are problems for society that need to be fixed. It is okay to use a social network to some extent, but many are using them past the line of regular communication.