Pros and Cons of Social Networking Sites

Due to the advent of the internet the world has turned into a global village and whatever seemed to be far away from us has now been brought to our doorstep by the World Wide Web (www). One of the few milestones of the internet is the making of the social networking sites which provides us with an opportunity to have contacts with people who are near and dear to us irrespective of their geographical placement in the world. It must be remembered though that there are both good and bad aspects of any discovery or invention. Similarly there are pros and cons of social networking sites.

Sites like facebook, google+, twitter, Orkut, hi5, etc are some of the social networking sites amongst which facebook, twitter and google+ are now dominating the social networking market. It is true that these social networking sites are helping people to maintain contact with each other to a great extent but it is also true that people are gradually getting addicted to theses social networking sites as they can not only chat with their near and dear ones but they can also go on playing games in these sites. People forget where to stop and have started using theses public forums as their personal diaries where they not only pen down their thoughts as their status updates but also they go on at times to give an account of their mood and relationship status as per their mental conditions. It is also true that many of us have the habit of adding people we don’t even know. This is quite dangerous because terrorism has now become a pandemic in society and hackers are always on their prowl so it is really not that difficult to hack anyone’s account, get their personal details and use it according to their own benefits.

The worst blow comes from the social networking sites to the society itself as we are getting attached to the internet society more than the original social strata in which we live. Our addiction towards theses sites is gradually making us unsocial in the real world as we do not have time for the person who is sitting next to us since we have to chat with the person online. It is driving us to a position where we in order to maintain our privacy in the web world are developing cocoons around ourselves from which we decide to come out only during times of needs or during times when we are not online in any of these social networking sites. Now it is for us to decide what do we choose for ourselves or what do we consider to be the priority — the real world or the web world?

It is true that there is no direct answer to this question as our lives are moving at a very fast pace where we do not have time to think about our own self leave alone thinking about others. The social networking sites help us to remain in touch with our friends, colleagues and family. It also helps us in increasing our contacts, advertising for any company and use our right to write anything without restriction on an open forum and without the complicity of much rules and laws. Thus, the pros and cons of social networking sites are huge but in the end it is up to the user as to what should be their approach towards these networking sites.