These days, the world pretty much operates on social networks. Especially teenagers. Teenagers can't seem to live without social networks. Facebook is the prime one. But it's not the only one. There are some people who don't like Facebook as much (or not anymore, because of Timeline), and so they use others instead. Twitter and Tumblr are the two other biggies right now. MySpace used to be a big one, but these days it's pretty dead there.
Now, I'm not saying the idea of social networks are a bad thing. Being an avid Facebook user myself, there are certainly many advantages to it. Being able to stay in touch with friends is certainly a fantastic thing. But what happens is that the type of powers you now have are abused.
Here's the type of things that happen: the posting of simply ridiculous and pointless things. Twitter is a nasty target of this; but really, Twitter is kinda pointless if you think about it. All it really is texting, only you're sending the text worldwide. Tumblr? That's just a ripoff of Blogger that caught the attention of all the teenagers looking for a place to vent their junk. Oh yeah, and I guess we musn't forget Google+, although I suppose if you think about it, it hasn't really gotten quite the popularity Google hoped for.
Let's start with Facebook. Now, this one seems about as awesome as it can be: a place where pretty much all your friends are, so that you can keep up with what they're doing and chat with them anytime when they're online! Seems like a dream come true. And really, it is. But what it boils down to, though, is that if you don't have your security settings set to the max, everyone else can see what you're doing as well. And there's always a chance that if you accidentally friend someone you don't know... well... yeah.
One thing that's rather ridiculous about Facebook is that you get Friend Requests from people you're not really actually friends with in real life, or get requests from people whose name you might perhaps know, but you don't really actually know them in real life. Why? Just so they can add an extra Friend to their roster. It's like they're just adding you for the sake of adding you. This can be traced to the rather wacko ways in which girls fight--which includes comparing the amount of Friends you have. "Oh yeah I've got 1500 friends..." Really? You actually *know* that many people in real life? Really? And *all* of them are really actually your friends?
And how about those posters that go "Repost if you believe in God," "Repost if you want to help this poor person," "Repost if you're against bullying," and ending with "I bet 99% of you won't." There's a reason for that. Although there is a little bit of point to the anti-bullying ones and what not, the "Repost if you love God" ones are just ridiculous. The general idea is if you don't repost that picture, you're gonna go to hell. But really? Would God condemn us just because we didn't share a stupid picture? Really?
And what's the deal with Twitter? Well, basically, like I said earlier, it's just worldwide texting. When you tweet things like "Sooooo tired" and what not... well, here's the truth: The world doesn't care! Only the people that are Following you are gonna care. And really, this can actually be applied to Facebook as well.
And here's a couple things that really just pollute all social networks. For example, girls these days are totally into photography. That's all good and fine and well, but it's when they start taking pictures of food or are literally uploading pictures of random things every 10 seconds that it's going overboard.
And also, there's the fact that people are so obsessed with their social networks that they can't step away from it for 10 seconds! We've got teenagers literally trying to pull out their phones in the middle of school just so they can look at their News Feed or their Twitter Feed, or whatever they use. Honestly? That's about as bad as cell phone/texting addiction. I can live perfectly fine without either. I love Facebook, but I'm not addicted so badly to it that I'm checking my News Feed every 10 seconds, or posting a new status update every 5 minutes, or worse still--doing stuff for the sole purpose of being able to post a status about it.
But sadly, this is the truth about social networks: when something like that is super-popular, and/or when people have too much time on their hands, they start abusing the newfound powers they have.
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