Scott Brind

Social networking is the main topic that springs to mind when talking about technology. Over the past few years, users of social networks has sky rocketed. So what is social networking? Social networking is a network of people connected together in some way. They allow people all over the world to connect together and view photos, messages, videos, links, etc. Some of the most well known social networking sites include: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Flickr.

The main advantage of social networking is the ability to be connected with your friends wherever you are. You are able to share photos from your last trip or post a link to your favourite website. Also, it is great publicity for people. Music stars such as Lily Allen and Kate Nash shot to fame through MySpace. By being able to upload their music onto MySpace they were able to gain a following of fans. As well as music stars, it can provide communication for businesses to with sites like Linkedin.

However, there are downsides to social networking. I personally do not enjoy social networking due to one problem: OVERLOAD. Today there are far too many social networking sites and you have to be on all of them because some of your friends are on one and another one is on a different site. Also, as well as too many sites, there are too many emails. A term has been given to emails that you get from Facebook notifying you that someone has added you and that is ‘Bacn’ (pronounced bacon). The reason this term was given was because those emails are not spam because you have subscribed to them. Email like this is not good as it ends up filling my inbox so I cannot see the important emails. Finally, this next disadvantage is one that affects most businesses all over the world, productivity. In most offices it tends to be quite common for workers to have open their Facebook page and be playing scrabulous during working hours. This is just another distraction for workers that employers have to compete with. An article last year from The Telegraph stated that ‘more than 70 per cent of businesses, including banks and law firms, have barred the sites’.

So to conclude, social networking can be good but can be bad. I think it is up to everyone to decide where they go and remember that there is a real world outside social networking!