Facebook, something that started in a dorm room at Harvard has been able to change our society in drastic ways since it was established in 2004. Our society has changed for better and for worse since Facebook was established. Today I will be focusing on the ways Facebook has negatively impacted and affected our society. Facebook has made us more lazy, gives us everything at our fingertips, and gives us superficial ideas.
We have been able to be more lazy since Facebook first hit the internet on February 4th, 2004 since we no longer have to move from our computer screens to do anything and everything that we think we need is on the internet anyway nowadays. We can talk to people without taking the time out of your day to truly interact with them, often taking away that special feeling that you used to get when you would get a call or a letter from someone you truly loved and cared about. With not taking the time out of your day to interact with someone we can also see what they are up to with just checking our Facebook news feed to see if they have updated their status and what their latest status is. You can see their latest trip, you they are currently dating, married, or engaged to, if they are expecting, and so much more even if they didn’t tell you about it, often making their best friends feel not as important when everyone knows what they are up to and not just them. In the movie Eduardo’s girlfriend got mad at Eduardo because he didn’t update his relationship status to “in a relationship”, leading to the end of their relationship. Before Facebook none that would of mattered since you would tell everyone you wanted to know that you were taken and that would be it but nowadays your relationship isn’t official unless it is online. People value the opinion of others online too much in today’s world and society and Facebook has contributed to that with putting everything we need to know about someone or something at our fingertips.
We also have everything at our fingertips, we no longer have to extensive research on something to find out if it is true. You see what is happening in the world just by refreshing your feed, no more reading the newspaper, no more TV news, taking jobs away from many people. In the movie Mark used Facebook to cheat on his art final/exam, he was able to do this by posting on Facebook about what he needed to know about and people told him the answers. He didn’t even need to open his textbook once or do one ounce of research, everyone did it for him. Some may argue that we have just became more efficient but I would argue that we have gotten more lazy, our rates of ADD and ADHD have gotten higher, we don’t work as hard, we always look for the shortcut that never works long term because we are lazy! All we care about is what’s online, what’s trending, and if you can’t get it at a click of a button it isn’t worth it. Education is less valued because people don’t want to work for it anymore.
Having everything at our fingertips makes us think we think we need to be a certain way, need to wear certain things, giving us superficial ideas about ourselves, others, and life in general. We see someone wearing a certain dress on Facebook and that the post got 300 likes and 200 comments so then we feel the need to go and buy that dress so people will tell us that we are pretty as all. We value the opinion of others to a point that it seems that their opinion is all we care about and without their validation that we are nothing. We go to the store and buy the dress you saw on Facebook in a different colour, one that complements your skin tone better. On the way home you stop for ice cream, but you can’t eat it until after you take the photo because you don’t want to appear chubby in the photo because according to our society that isn’t beautiful. Once you get home you do your makeup and hair, put on the dress take a couple of photo and upload them to Facebook so all of your “friends” think you are going out on a Friday night, having fun. As quickly as you put on the dress you take it off slip into your favourite pair of pajamas, take off your makeup, and put your hair in a bun. You sit on your couch eating the Ben and Jerry’s you bought earlier that day, crying as you upload the photo of you in the dress waiting for the likes and comments to pour in, for that superficial validation to pour in so you’ll feel better about yourself. In the movie Sean Parker who only cared about being in the club, money, fame, what people thought of him, and superficial ideas in general, he took Mark under his wing who never cared about anything the least bit superficial completely changed. Soon he only cared about superficial things, ruining his friendship with Eduardo who didn’t care about superficial items or things at all. Superficial ideas and items have the power to ruin our self esteems, friendships, relationships, and so much more.
Facebook in just under 12 years has had the power to completely change our society in more ways than Mark ever thought would be possible, it started off in his dorm room at Harvard but has now completely changed the way people live, communicate, and go about their day to day lives. Our lives and society will never be the the way it used to be because of Facebook. We have never been more lazy, had more things at our fingertips, or had this many superficial ideas, as we have had in the past 12 years. Everything has changed.
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