Classroom Publication

Issue date: 11/23/09 Section: Social Media

Media Credit: http://www.spaceforideas.uk.com/ Susan Greenfield, a professor at Oxford University, fears social networking sites like Facebook may have negative impacts on human interaction.

Facebook "helps you connect and share with the people in your life," says the site's login page.

Are social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter helpful or harmful to society? Does Facebook help bring people together, or does it teach them to prefer interaction with a screen rather than with real people? The answers are unclear, but the debate is worth thinking about.

Facebook was originally conceived as a means of communication between college students. Before September 2006, users needed a college e-mail address to register for the site. Since then, anyone can register. The site's press page lists the total number of active numbers on Facebook at 300 million. In September 2009, users spent 1.4 billion hours logged on to the site. Facebook is a cultural phenomenon, and it doesn't look like it's going to go away any time soon.

According to Baroness Susan Greenfield, a professor at Lincoln College, Oxford Univeristy, Facebook and similar sites are harming human society and interaction. On-screen interactions, according to Greenfield, are easier than more stressful face-to-face conversations. She fears that young people may eventually evolve to prefer virtual interactions to real life ones.

"Real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction."

--Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford University
Read the full article here.

Another anti-Facebook argument is that time spent on Facebook negatively impacts users' grades. A study by Ohio State University found a correlation between college students' poor grades and time spent on Facebook, but, as the study points out, the site itself cannot necessarily be blamed for users' poor grades. If Facebook didn't exist, its users would most likely find another way to procrastinate instead of doing school work.

Whether or not social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are beneficial or harmful to society, there's no chance that they'll disappear any time soon. The only thing users can do to avoid the fate suggested by Susan Greenfield is to remember that social networking sites are meant to be a supplement to real-time, face-to-face interaction with others-- not a replacement for it.

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