Facebook has been the most popular social trend for the last ten years. It has over 2 billion users and is available in over 100 languages. A person can create an account on the Facebook website by providing some personal information. It has two main pages, profile which is the user’s timeline which shows basic information of the user, their photos and share posts and home which shows the newsfeed shared by friends , groups, pages and even own status updates. After account creation, the user should then be able to send and accept friend request thereby staying connected with family and friends
Facebook and individuals
Even if learning about Facebook features is important, it is important to consider how the site is used and the person using it. This therefore brings in the need to discuss the psychological aspect of Facebook. Identifying why people feel the need to join Facebook, the common characteristics of the Facebook users, how people extend their network of connection, how they interact and share information. Research conducted indicate that the initial reasons why people join Facebook is the popularity of the network and the fun that is believed to be there once one joins Facebook. Other reasons why people join Facebook is the ease of use, peer pressure, its benefits or trust.
Analysis of Facebook and characteristics of the Facebook users ranges from the gender to personal characters of individuals. Research has observed that women are more likely to use Facebook account than men. In terms of personal character, it is observed that extroversion is common among the users. Extroverts used Facebook more than Introverts. Maybe a future research would aim to analyse the demographic difference between users and non-users of Facebook. (Florian)
Another area of research is how individuals with Facebook account build and maintain their network connection. The word friends as used in Facebook do not refer to the number of offline friend a person have. Some users have friends upto a thousand while others have one. Averagely, every user have an average of 130 friends something probably not true in reality. Being able to connect online doesn’t mean the individuals will keep the connection offline. Some of the online friends could be high school mates who we no longer have contact with and yet we are connected online. Something of wonder is that individuals who stay connected online may not have a face to face connection even if they had a chance to. It is therefore hard to analyze if Facebook is indeed used to compliment a face to face interaction or it just substitutes it. The motives for adding another user to our network differs from one user to another even though research shows that social attractiveness of a user go in hand with the number of friends a person has meaning it increases with increase in the number of friends.(Helmut,Gerlach " Cruisis 67)
Disclosing of information on Facebook profiles depend partly on an individual character such that an introvert with low self esteem may disclose untrue information in order to become popular while narcissists may disclose information for self- promotion. So popularity is believed to be the main determinant of disclosure. Furthermore the nature of information that might be most private to one individual it might me too public for another and vice versa. So it is hard to determine what is too private or too public on Facebook. Privacy protection settings exist for the users to determine how much of their personal information is accessible by the public. It is however possible that a private information might be shared on your timeline by a friends without your consent through the feature of tagging where a friend may post a picture or information online and tag, such that the information will appear on your profile and all friends can see it. It is therefore important that users adjust their privacy settings so that they can monitor the amount of information ro be seen by those who can read posts on their profile.
Facebook and organizations
In today’s business world, organizations do not just use emails or letters and other formal ways of communication to communicate with their customers and suppliers. Companies now create fans pages on Facebook and use it as a platform to market their product, discuss and share ideas of new products. A lot of Facebook users now join Facebook primarily to like organizations’ groups and pages and not just for social interactions. Organizations can also use Facebook platform as a recruitment base by reaching out to potential future staff through advertisement of job vacancies and opportunities.(Adamic,Messing "Eytan 1130) A company may also reach out to other organizations on their fan pages to identify companies that may give them the right supplies they need.
Benefits and risks of joining Facebook
Facebook provides a platform for extending friendship with those we meet in different areas of our lives. It also allows sharing of information through posts on timeline or messages. It also provides a platform for business promotion through opening of common groups and pages, a person can advertise their work to targeted market. Disadvantages of Facebook include Facebook addiction, disclosure of false information and creation of fake accounts by malicious people with the intention of stalking, bullying, or even blackmailing. Another problem that has arisen is the increase in number of scams where hackers who use social media websites to access personal information and sometimes they may even ask for personal bank details. Despite Facebook ensuring that privacy settings are feature on the website to enhance privacy of information, some Facebook users have no idea of how to use these settings. Since now social media has become a part of our social environments, users’ characters and social development is much affected by Facebook. Teenagers whose social development is at peak at times may feel the aspect of privacy intrusion, low self seem especially if they feel like they are physically unattractive.
Conclusion/Judgment
Basing on what has been found out about Facebook and the level of interaction between Facebook users who can be individuals as well as organizations, my judgement would be that Facebook can be dangerous if not well used. The reason for saying this is because I feel Facebook has a much power to influence our psychology. We have seen how different users might have different intentions to join Facebook. Some are scammers, some are bullies, critics, business opportunists and even narcissists. Therefore, users should be careful on their intentions as well as of those they interact with on Facebook. There also should be a world campaign to advocate the use of Facebook in ways that uphold morality and social ethics.
Works cited
Appel, Helmut, Alexander L. Gerlach, and Jan Crusius. "The interplay between Facebook use, social comparison, envy, and depression." Current Opinion in Psychology 9 (2016): 44-49.
Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. "Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook." Science 348.6239 (2015): 1130-1132.
Krebs, Florian, et al. "Social Emotion Mining Techniques for Facebook Posts Reaction Prediction." arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.03249 (2017).
