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When you hear a 6 year old complain about not posting the right picture on their Facebook account, don’t be surprised. Facebook is the new drug that has everybody engulfed. Talk about kids, teenagers, millennials, everyone is on it. There are over 7.6 billion people in this world as of December 2017, and over 2 billion of those are on Facebook.
That is a terrifying huge number of people. The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has been travelling around the world to access the Facebook user base and the impact it’s having on people’s lives. Because Uncle Ben said it best, “With great power comes great responsibility”
But the responsibility falls on us as well, after all we are the ones using it!
Facebook Pros
Connectivity
The first and foremost benefit of using Facebook is the unlimited connectivity it provides. Whenever any of my friends go some place I can’t reach them via my phone, I’ve noticed they would always resort to using Facebook. Not Instagram, Not Twitter, It’s always Facebook or Whatsapp. Why is that? I think that’s partially due to the reason that they keep devices with low quality android smartphones and low bandwidth internet connections part of their target audience. Facebook apps are optimized to work best on high quality devices and internet as well as cheaper smartphones and bad internet. That brings us the ‘Connected everywhere’ benefit.
Facebook welcomes everyone
“Facebook optimizes its apps to work the best on low quality smartphones and bad internet connections.”
Free and Quality communication
This is probably the most missed benefit of using Facebook. I understand there are other free social media apps as well, but Facebook has a different league. So many ways you could communicate. Send in a message , call or put a status update. Get your message across and that too for free.
Global Village of Information
If you didn’t skim through to the bullet points, you already know the vast majority of different minds zoning in on Facebook. It’s literally a giant global pool for sharing ideas, thoughts, and learning amazing new things by like-minded people.
How do you do that?
Facebook Cons
Privacy Leaks
Privacy has always been the biggest concern for everyone on Facebook, females primarily. Since so much of your information is out there, you are more vulnerable and susceptible to attacks like identity theft, hacked accounts and frauds. The easiness the sign up process brings, is misused to create multiple fake ids.
Another thing we all know is, anything once posted online, is never gone. One way you can save yourself, is by thoroughly reading the privacy settings, as Facebook keeps changing, and making sure you know whatever you post online is on public or private.
Special shout out to females: Don’t go around adding everyone on your Faebook account, check their profile to see if it’s some fake id.
In U.S, the police were reported over 40 crimes linked with Facebook.
Time consuming
So much available on one single platform, that you don’t need to scroll away to some other site, makes time feel irrelevant. Facebook is very addictive. Idle scrolling, videos, memes and what not can get you hooked for hours and hours. The worst of all, people have started substituting Facebook surfing for avoiding interaction or hiding uneasiness while communication. You could drown in the amount of information Facebook throws at you, and miss doing something constructive with that time.
Try using Facebook with a timer. Maybe that could help with the time wastage.
Freedom of expression
No matter our progress with technology, we as humans have not evolved emotionally to not take things too far. Anyone can say anything on Facebook and you might end up becoming the laughing stock of eternity in front of the whole world. Cyber bullying seems to be rising as one joke becomes viral and effects people so much to the point that they take their own life!
When you start something like that, always trade place with the other person before you say or do anything that you will regret the rest of your life.
Not everything is as it seems
Our interaction is majorly based on emotional and physical cues. What a person is actually feeling is not visible through texts or emoticons. There is high chance that you could be missing out on someone showing signs of depression and negativity.
“Sharon Seline’s daughter committed suicide after ‘chatting’ with mother and portraying happy heart emoticons and smiles”
Link here.
Adds are annoying
Facebook has started adjusting adds within videos. You would be enjoying a perfectly funny video and boom! An ad comes on, no matter ads are small to medium in duration, but that interrupts a perfectly happy user.
Frequent updates
The irony here is that Facebook frequently updates and evolves to create better user experience, but at times they end up decreasing the user experience. It’s in our basic nature to resist change. Why? Because learning something new is hard. Facebook updated their security settings and profile view. A lot of us wouldn’t have adapted if Facebook hadn’t pinged us to adapt. Unless the updates address a massive pain point, people don’t usually follow. I can bet, a lot of your readers don’t use customized lists options for sharing status updates? See my point.
How do you use Facebook? What were the key benefits you gained from using Facebook? What did you regret doing on Facebook? Share your thoughts with us.
Content Writer
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