Letter to the Editor

Re: Facebook friends share ”˜25 Things’ with the world. Feb, 4

From my perspective, the role of Facebook in our life has become too significant. Today Facebook is in the top ten of the most visited sites and is rumored to have the income of $1,5 million per a week. What does Facebook give us that our life cannot offer us? When people go to such social networking websites as Facebook, they seek communication and feeling of being in a certain community, surrounded by those people that they choose themselves. The necessity to establish their own status can be fully realized in the web, where they are what they want.

People try to be original and individual. In fact, they can never achieve it, as in the network, particularly in Facebook, everything is decided beforehand. You can choose from a restricted number of gifts, you have a certain variety of icons, you have to be open to people because these are the rules of Facebook.

The fact that Facebook has altered radically the way we see our communication with people is obvious. The number of services it offers today allows us even to revise our lifestyle. Virtual communication gradually replaces the common face-to-face contact, introducing depersonalization as people are substituted for disembodied texts. This fact shows that anonymity in relations is encouraged as it leads to no responsibility.

At the same time, I absolutely agree that due to its unsurpassable popularity Facebook becomes the source of danger to people and their private data. Besides “25 things” list, where people voluntarily give some information about them, phishing becomes more and more widespread nowadays. Cheating people into giving their passwords, usernames, other personal information, hackers use phishing for identity theft. Facebook is a very convenient place for spreading viruses because sending different links is a common way of sharing of information. It is enough to access somebody’s page and it is possible to play the master on the website. In fact, the defects of Facebook security form an exclusive circle.

I am sure that it is necessary to see Facebook as a mere way of communication and not to be plunged into it, confusing imagined world with reality.



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