by Michelle Wilkinson

Created on: October 09, 2009   Last Updated: April 03, 2011

Facebook is a social networking website that enables you to rediscover old friends, former colleagues, and long-lost family members, as well as giving you the opportunity to connect with new people. Facebook has made the process of staying in touch with other people much easier as you can inform everyone who is a 'friend' what is going on in your life, as well as discovering what is going on in their own lives, but there are some drawbacks of using Facebook in order to communicate with other people.

One of these drawbacks is that some people are increasingly being drawn into the cyber-world, becoming addicted to communicating through their computer, rather than actually engaging with people in a social environment. There are individuals who spend eight hours a day at work sat in front of their computer, and yet the first thing they do when they get home is connect to the internet and update their Facebook page. Online social networking might be more convenient since you can avoid leaving the house, but it is hardly likely to do your real social life any favours, particularly if you mainly communicate with old friends who have moved away and made their own, new friends.

Indeed, discovering what all your friends are up to can be rather depressing, and if you have low self-esteem anyway, Facebook might be worth avoiding. After all, everyone wants to make their life seem more exciting than it is, and Facebook is the ideal place to 'show off' about how brilliant your life is, whether or not this is true. Whilst you might be completely honest, others can be less so, which might be dangerous if you decide to use sites such as Facebook to establish new relationships.

In fact, when you sign up to Facebook you might enthusiastically sign up anyone who wants to be your friend, before coming to the realisation that you have hundreds of 'friends', even though you only know a dozen or so of them. You realise that every update, message, and photo can be read by a lot of people who you actually know very little about, which can be rather disconcerting. This must be how individuals get caught out by prospective employers, as once you have decided to share an embarrassing photograph with your 'friends' then it is there for the world to see.

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, may have some benefits as they can help you make contact with old friends, but they also have the potential damage your social life if you become too dependent on them for communication purposes.

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