Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Networking Essay | Bartleby

One of the key attributes amongst living things is communication. There are many ways for humans to communicate, whether it is face to face, telegrams, snail mail, texting, et cetera. The form of communication that has rapidly increased over the years is social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , Google Plus, et cetera. In fact, according to Pew Internet, as of 2012, eighty-one percent of teenagers who use the Internet are using it for social networking sites (Madden et al.). Furthermore, as of May 2013, seventy-two percent of adults who are online are social networking sites users, which is five percent higher than a year ago and sixty-four percent higher than where it was in February 2005 (Brenner and Smith). With the

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There is a fear of someone hacking into a person’s account and steal valuable information of said person to use for malicious purposes, such as identity theft, for instance. If the wrong person is successful in stealing another person’s information, the results could be potentially devastating for the victim.
Another con of using social networking sites is that it can be addictive if someone spends too much time on them. This could have dire consequences if students are spending too much time chatting with their friends on Facebook, an employee playing games on social networking sites instead of working on productivity reports, just to name a couple of scenarios. There is even a possibility of someone incurring health problems, such as sleep deprivation, joint problems, and blurry vision, just to name a few examples, from spending too much time on social networking sites.
A potential setback to spending too much time on social networking sites is that if people – especially teenagers – engage in hypernetworking (spending more than three hours a day on social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace), it could lead to some dangerous vices, such as smoking, binge drinking, other illicit drugs use, et cetera; at least this is true according to Scott Frank, the lead researcher of the study conducted by the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine (Payne). However, there does not appear to be any evidence that hypernetworking is the direct cause of such