QuakersYard

Social networking has changed the way we not only interact with each other on the internet, but also how we communicate and organise ourselves in our daily lives. You may have been invited to a specific event on Facebook, as an example, and this would be a great way of demonstrating this. You may not have heard about the event from word of mouth or letter or something similar, but chances are you will have heard about it on a social networking site, especially if it is not in your direct area or is in the semi-distant future. This has effectively both opened up and closed off certain areas of communication, as the globalisation of the event would be higher, but the lack of word of mouth means that closer relationships may suffer.

As a tool, social networking can work well in business and other fields, increasing the amount of useful people that are available to you, and broadening your scope of considering who is useful to you. As such, it can be all too easy to add people on social networking sites that turn out to be useless, or bearing little relation to what you actually want out of the relationship. In this way, social networking tends to make people simultaneously more open to new things and more biased about the things they already like, similar to having lots of acquaintances without having many real friends. The amount of time needed to be spent on these sites can also be detrimental to social and emotional wellbeing.