The Facebook Epidemic
Date written: Sep 25 2008
Facebook is the new sensation that is invading teenager’s computers across the continent. For any of you who don’t know, although I am sure you all do, Facebook is a “Social Networking” website that enables you to keep in contact with your friends. It seems that everybody, young and old, is hooked up in this social web. The popularity of the site is unparalleled; not even seen in similar sites such as MySpace or Nexopia. Currently, I have over 150 “friends”: school acquaintances, teachers, cousins that I haven’t seen in three years, even my Aunt’s foreign exchange student that she had over five years ago is suddenly wanting to chat and see “what’s up”.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Even though there are a vast majority of benefits that such a site brings there are undoubtedly some aspects that can hurt you if you abuse them. “Addiction has a new face” is the title of a newspaper article detailing why people spend too much time on Facebook. Aside from the obvious though, if you knew what you post on Facebook could lose you that job that you wanted or even get you expelled or suspended would you be so apt to still use the site in the same way that you did without knowing? No.
Employers are now using Facebook to “check up” on you before they hire you. They know your personal life, you are in a relationship in, anything that you make public but intended it only for people you know. You can tell a lot about a person’s character just by looking on their profile. One thing that particularly perplexes me is that a number of teens are so brazen as to put pictures of themselves drinking on their profiles. This has been used to expel students who were drinking on campus as well as students who are drinking underage.
Now, are you totally turned off of Facebook? Don’t be. There is an easy remedy to this problem: Set your security levels. All you have to do is set your security levels so only your friends can see your profile. Not your prospective boss, teacher, principal or internet creep. Using this simple measure that would only take you a few minutes anyways can, in reality, save you a lot of troubles in the future.
SO TRUE.
I gotta say, I have to AGREE with ya! Facebook is useful, but also dangerous. I hope schools could do more educational presentations on the "Darkside" of facebook. It wuld inform lots of peoples, cuz, there's still MANY MANY MANY peoples out there that don't know the dangers to exposing too much info on Facebook.
