We all know them in one form or another: Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Hi5; and the list goes on. Social networking sites are becoming increasingly popular in our world and whether we have noticed our kids spent more time on those than doing their homework, or whether we ourselves have trouble keeping off them at work, most of us almost certainly have been influenced by their presence at some point. There is no doubt that they are extremely useful to keep in touch with old friends, for example, or to share thoughts, photos, or the newest events in one’s life. Social networking sites will typically also have a range of applications that the user can take advantage of when they are bored. With all these benefits and the great entertainment value, it is hard to look behind all this and ask oneself what the drawbacks and the risks might be.

Keeping in touch with people

Such sites were first designed simply so that everybody could keep in touch with old friends or keep track of what new friends are doing. It is undeniable that in this respect, Facebook and the likes of it are extremely useful. You can find people using your email register, you can also find people that used to go to the same school or college as you did, and most sites will even suggest to you people you might know based on the number of friends you have in common. Having a bunch of friends will enable you to look at their photos, check out their career information and see how they are doing now, what they ended up studying, maybe even who they ended up marrying through their relationship status, and so on. It definitely is a nice feeling to come across the profile of an old friend, from high school, maybe, that you quite liked but unfortunately lost touch with, and to be able to see how they are doing. Also, you will be able to share your own news through photos, status updates – these are little messages to tell the world how you are feeling, what you are doing, what mood you’re in, etc. – and the information you choose to fill in about yourself. Social networking sites generally tend to bring you a lot closer to people, even people from your workplace or maybe, if you are a student, your teachers.

The drawbacks

But that, precisely, might be the problem. In real life, we tend to have ‘walls’ to separate different areas of our lives, e.g. we might not want our mother, who is now well over sixty and lives with three cats and our senile dad, or our boss, to whose face we make a big effort to seem efficient and very serious, to access the drunken photos that were taken of us last night. If such people are in one’s friend circle on social networking sites, then such ‘walls’ could be broken down and that could well happen. In fact, businesses one applies to might well search for one’s profile on such sites, and, if one’s privacy settings allow this, access it, along with the photos of us hugging everyone compulsively and chugging one Cosmo after the other. Not the best job interview technique, to say the least. Furthermore, recently the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, introduced new Terms of Service which gave way to a huge controversy as they basically stated that you gave up your rights to any content you uploaded, meaning your pictures, anything you wrote, etc. Following user protests, those Terms have now been removed and Zuckerberg has insisted, albeit not very plausibly, that the users understood the Terms wrong. This raised a larger question about privacy and data sharing. How much information about your life do you really want on the internet, where it can be accessed by basically anyone and will usually still be stored on the server after you delete your account?

There are far too many conspiracy theorists out there, who see social networking sites as the root of all evil. It is quite doubtful whether a bit of fun on the internet should be taken so very seriously; however, it is very important to be aware of the fact that as soon as you upload, post or otherwise publish something on the internet, you can no longer control who sees it. As long as you know that, network away.