Facebook: Love It or Leave It?

I found the article, “Explaining Why Young Adults Use MySpace and Facebook Through Uses and Gratification Theory” by Urista, Dong, and Day,* to be really interesting. The researchers explored social networking sites, or SNS, and why users use them. Basically, they concluded that SNS allow users to satisfy needs and wants in numerous ways. The five most popular uses of SNS that the researches learned from college-student focus groups are as follows: efficient communication, convenient communication, curiosity about others, popularity, and relationship formation and reinforcement (pg. 221).

As a user of the social networking site, Facebook, I agreed with all of these uses. Facebook is a quick and easy way to maintain old and form new relationships. I use it to keep in contact with old friends. I appreciate the informal attitude Facebook promotes when maintaining these relationships because it allows me to stay in touch, without verbal or face-to-face interaction. I can be involved with people’s lives without ever actually seeing them, which is nice for people who are friends, but not great friends. Facebook helps me avoid awkward social situations. To be sure, we are relying on Facebook more and more, for learning about others, as well as staying in contact with friends.

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This article made me wonder, however, if SNS really are as great as we make them out to be. It is true that they make communication easy, but perhaps they also make communication weak. We are losing our public speaking skills, as well as proper conversation etiquette because we do not have to practice these skills anymore. We can sit and take a good deal of time to ponder what we would like to say, as opposed to the quick responses required of real, face-to-face conversations. That is, we become over-involved in the virtual world and begin to avoid the real world. I feel like we, as a Facebook nation, are losing the art of verbal communication. If this is indeed true, then many of us college students are in trouble. Employers still expect good verbal skills and we may endanger our chances of getting jobs if we rely too heavily on SNS.




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Right now, Facebook and other SNS are a necessity for me as a college student. I need to network with others that share similar majors and future career goals in order to be successful. What's more, SNS allow me to manage my time more efficiently. Facebook lets me have a social life, while still managing to get homework done. That said, it is my hope that in a few years I will be able to close my Facebook account and go back to using older media to stay in touch with friends and family, like the telephone or writing letters. At least it is a dream.



*Explaining Why Young Adults Use MySpace and Facebook Through Uses and Gratification Theory, by Urista, Dong, and Day, in Human Communication 12:2 (Summer 2009), pp. 215-229. Retrieved from Communication and Media Complete, on Oct. 25, 2009.