Communication is by far the biggest use of the internet to date, and will almost certainly be staying that way for generations to come. Anyone using the internet has realised by now that social networking is something that we all use to communicate with on a daily basis. It’s an ever growing fashion and, even more so, an ever growing way of life. A way of life that is perhaps more important for most than first though. 93% of marketers use social media for business purposes. Without the kind of advertisement that comes from social media those businesses may never have existed at all. With so many social networking sites, forums and instant messaging sites all over the internet, it is practically impossible to keep away from them. Let’s take Facebook for example.
Facebook is a social networking site that started up in the February of 2004. It is recorded that as of July, 2011, Facebook has more than 750 million active users, with more users joining every single day. Facebook was founded by a man named Mark Zuckerberg along with some of his college friends: Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. To start off with the site was only ever made to be used by adults, but slowly and surely, the teenage generation came into the equation. Facebook’s ‘terms and conditions’ state that only people over the age of 13 may use the site, but according to ConsumerReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under the age of 13 with a Facebook account. In fact, it is such a well-known and widespread site that there are even babies in Egypt with the name ‘Facebook’. Not only that, if Facebook was a country it would be the 3rd largest country in the world in terms of its population count; topping countries such as Brazil and the U.S, and being beaten by India at 2nd and China being 1st.
However, despite communication being such a vastly used product among the internet, it cannot undergo such success and fame without a couple of fundamental errors. No one person can use social media without having the possibility to be subject to hackers and viruses. With the evolution of social media, so has the means to hack into these widely used systems, and cause major corruption by injecting viruses. Hackers can use a multitude of software to gain access to what would originally be inaccessible by the average user. Once you have been hacked, the hacker may have access to all your personal information including bank credentials and address, and may even ‘leak’ said information to the web. This is usually the case for many celebs and iconic figures that get hacked, and are sadly unaware of the process.
Advantages of Communication:
-Signing up to social networking sites, or any form of online communication, is usually very easy and quick to do, as you only need to ever provide your email and name most of the time.
-Changing your security allows you to block and ignore particular people from talking and communicating with you.
-It makes talking to a number of people separately easy to do; you can also sort people into groups for even more ease of use.
-If someone you want to talk to is not online you are able to send offline messages to them, so when they come back online the message will be there waiting to be read.
-Finding people you know using search bars is very easy, and becomes easier if there is a suggested friends list that gives you examples of people you are most likely to know through others.
Disadvantages of Communication:
-The most obvious disadvantage is that if someone finds out your password that you use to access your means of communication they can act as being yourself, and since you can not the real person behind the screen, this leads to fraud and identity theft.
-Going through the various levels of security in most social networks are very long and tedious to do and it becomes easy to get lost in their policy's and security stages.
-Nowadays many people, especially the younger teenage generation, are becoming increasingly addicted to social networking, and are losing the people-skills that are needed for their future.
My Experience:
My experience with communication online is all to do with social networking. I have used many various forms of social networking, such as Skype and more commonly MSN messenger and Facebook. There was a point when Facebook was a completely new concept to the younger generation and so everyone started to flood into its servers, and so I would be on Facebook for a long amount of time in the evenings. Now I very rarely go onto Facebook to talk to people, only for status updating and catching up with people I havnt seen recently. Apart from social networking sites such as the ones I have just listed, i've never been a part of any of the other fairly well known ones like Myspace or Bebo.
-Signing up to social networking sites, or any form of online communication, is usually very easy and quick to do, as you only need to ever provide your email and name most of the time.
-Changing your security allows you to block and ignore particular people from talking and communicating with you.
-It makes talking to a number of people separately easy to do; you can also sort people into groups for even more ease of use.
-If someone you want to talk to is not online you are able to send offline messages to them, so when they come back online the message will be there waiting to be read.
-Finding people you know using search bars is very easy, and becomes easier if there is a suggested friends list that gives you examples of people you are most likely to know through others.
Disadvantages of Communication:
-The most obvious disadvantage is that if someone finds out your password that you use to access your means of communication they can act as being yourself, and since you can not the real person behind the screen, this leads to fraud and identity theft.
-Going through the various levels of security in most social networks are very long and tedious to do and it becomes easy to get lost in their policy's and security stages.
-Nowadays many people, especially the younger teenage generation, are becoming increasingly addicted to social networking, and are losing the people-skills that are needed for their future.
My Experience:
My experience with communication online is all to do with social networking. I have used many various forms of social networking, such as Skype and more commonly MSN messenger and Facebook. There was a point when Facebook was a completely new concept to the younger generation and so everyone started to flood into its servers, and so I would be on Facebook for a long amount of time in the evenings. Now I very rarely go onto Facebook to talk to people, only for status updating and catching up with people I havnt seen recently. Apart from social networking sites such as the ones I have just listed, i've never been a part of any of the other fairly well known ones like Myspace or Bebo.
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