Social Networks

XXXXXXXXX                                                                2013, February 5th

TS4

ENGLISH

INTRO

Social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook, attract millions of users, many of them on a daily basis.

A social network site is an internet application that allows people to communicate with other users for having relationships based on different interests.

Today these sites are famous and weigh a lot of money thanks to advertisements. For example the well known Facebook created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 was at the beginning a network for Harvard students. Today there are 1 billion of active users, and it has a turnover of 3.7 billions of dollar (1 billion of net income), FB’s weigh is estimated around 100 millions of dollars.

These very attractive cash machines for owners, have advantages for users but a lot of drawbacks as well.

1. ADVANTAGES

The main advantage of social network is the huge amount of worldwide relationships people can have easily. Indeed users can find friends, jobs or even romance thanks to social network.

The second advantage is the speed for spreading the news: We can know at any time (24 hours a day and 7 days a week) what happen everywhere in the world.

Another important advantage is to create Commonality of Interest: you can be in contact with a lot of individuals whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours. You can interact with people who have the same passion than yours for example horses, games and so on.

People can also receive support from like-minded individuals as well as advices on career, studies or even personal issues.

Lastly, these sites can also provide the possibility to post advertising to millions of people on a free basis which can be very useful for a small company or even for young “entrepreneurs”.

1. DISAVANTAGES

Let’s now focus on social networking drawbacks.

As we are talking about virtual relationships there can be a lot of fake identities behind public profile: this is the main negative impact of these social networks. Indeed there is the possibility for criminals to be in contact with a lot of people. So people can be confronted to fraud on identity theft or stalkers or even more dangerous teenage predators. Children can also be in contact with inappropriate contents such as pornography or violence.

Moreover people have to be careful with the contents they post on the web: indeed a lot of employers are watching on social networks to know more about their employees, so people have to be careful about their posts if they don’t want be fired. Another contents which can be dangerous is posts regarding absences from home during holidays which can be helpful information for thieves

Lastly these sites reduce or eliminate face to face communications which are important mainly for teens socialization. People can hide behind false identity pretending to be someone else, and it’s particulary dangerous for tweens and teens because when they are supposed to learn how to interact with others or build and maintain relationships without their parents. Today 41 percent spend their time posting messages.

CONCLUSION

Social networks are very famous and have many new users, sometimes very young, each day. The purpose of these sites is to be attractive for users but is to generate money for their owners. Indeed, all information given on the web is used to target adds sent on the social networks.

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