Facebook Is a Useful Social and Marketing Medium Essay

Facebook Is a Useful Social and Marketing Medium - Essay Example Orkut, MySpace and Yahoo did all Facebook had to offer and enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame before being dwarfed by Zuckerberg’s brainchild. Taking the world by storm, giving birth to a whole new lexicon of marketing terminology and giving the word â€Å"addiction† a whole new spin, Facebook has its fair share of lovers and haters. However, this paper will go to show how Facebook is, despite its shortcomings, a very useful medium for everyone who uses it responsibly. Employers who feel they are being cheated out of the time they are paying for; parents concerned over what they think is an unhealthy obsession; sociologists crying over the fading away of ‘real’, as opposed to ‘virtual’, interaction between humans; and media giants who treat the distribution of information as their right alone, fall in the category of those who do not approve of Facebook. The opponents of this medium have a lot to say against what they consider to be a waste of time, addictive, anti-social – in the literal sense of the word â€Å"social† – or just a nuisance.... Through their posts, people even share their grief and problems, and having friends comment and give advice, even if it is only online, helps them to feel better. It is, therefore, not correct to call Facebook a distraction, when it actually is therapeutic as well. Whether it is used to decrease one’s tensions, or to voice one’s opinions, or even to share one’s problems, Facebook proves to be a good tool. Some people, concerned with the already growing lack of privacy online, claim that Facebook allows for invasion of privacy. People are free to not only access your information that you have allowed to be public, but sometimes, due to the constant updates and changes of Facebook’s privacy policies, even the information that you chose to keep private can be accessed by the public. In short, what is private today may very well be public tomorrow. What is more, users have been known to share their passwords with their friends so that the friends can check out the users’ other friends (Jones 3). Nonetheless, when someone posts on the world wide web, it is, of course, natural the â€Å"whole wide world† will get access to those posts. You cannot post on a â€Å"social† website, like Facebook, and then complain about the fact that society got to read everything. The whole basis of a social networking site is to connect people from all over the world, in a bid to bring them closer, moreover, a simple way for a private person to avoid becoming public is not to post on such sites. However, to sign up for Facebook and then not post defeats the purpose of signing up, a much better option, therefore, is for users to think before they make posts; do they want what they are posting to be seen by all, or would they rather not?