RL - remember that? Could the same not be said of the above of our beloved site? Of course not, our participation here is purely healthy. There's no obsessives here. From: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20090220/tuk-get-off-facebook-and-get-a-life-dba1618.html
I'm getting sick of scientists blaming the internet for everything. If you'll remember, before the internet, it was TVs. Before that, movies. Before that, the radio. It's just a scapegoat they use so they don't have to say "Yeah, we're all going to **** and there's nothing we can do about it."
That psychologist can stfu. They've completely disregarded the fact that most of us have quite a few commitments to adhere to before we can make the time for 'face-face interaction' ... I don't know about anyone else..but farrout, I'm lucky if I can see my friend's once a fortnight face to face, let alone on a weekily basis. Social networking sites are the next best thing to 'face to face' contact. And come on, as if make the assumption that I'd choose msn-msging my friends over actually hanging out with them. Ha I say, ha!
Great so now Facebook causes cancer. What the hell doesn't?! In saying that though, I kinda agree that if the internet is your main source of social interaction - then that's pretty bad. If you use it as a tool to keep in contact with friends you've met, fair play but to make friends on it and not interact with folk in RL - thats far from ideal
I submit that the main purpose of this study was to provide Dr. Sigman with an excuse to use facebook at work.
I have a Facebook... which sees less than five minutes of use a week. Should I stop? I do not want to catch cancer. >_<
Don't you know? dying is the only thing that does not kill you. As far as Facebook is conserned; I cannot think of the last time I even inspected my own account ... even still ... things like this ride me, it's just scare-mongering.
Makes sense to me. Then again, 1. I don't know anybody on Facebook or MySpace, apparently people from my part of the world don't use social networking sites; 2. every time I'm "friended" by someone on such sites, they never even attempt to make any sort of actual contact with me, Internet or otherwise, so what's the point of "social networking"?; and 3. I don't have a social life, never have, and find the thought of one to be a lot more fabulous than spending time on yet another dumb website, not socializing. Sometimes you take what you can get, but given the choice, there are no adequate substitutes for face-to-face contact. I've never made lasting relationships on a website. And believe me, I've tried. Guess I'm the odd one out. But spending time with friends in reality sounds a whole lot better than talking to them on a website, if I had to be given the choice between the two. I'm willing to bet most of the people who've responded here DO have social lives, however modest (and yes, just one real-life friend counts as a social life), so it's much easier to write off this study as rubbish.
It depends. Some of us live alone in a remote place, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. I can go a whole week without seeing another human being, let alone speak with one. Having said that, my experience with Facebook has been the same as tehuti88. Hurray for hobby and special interest sites!
Yeah but isn’t it good to have 1,000+ friends (Facebook, myspace) and thousands of page views....how grand is it!............. Note - I'm not serious. I alway hear a lot about how kids these days don't socialise as much as older generations (Though how we socialise is always going to change with time/technology). I just think facebook/myspace/hobo whatever, is just a target for these issues that are always being raised. You have to have one scapegoat, and this is what you have. I find it pathetically funny that on one hand you have people telling Generation Y and Generation Z (Or generation I) that its better to have face to face contact rather then lazy over these websites, YET we all know how incredibly bubble wrapped this cotton generation is....everything that was fun an social about previous generations has been locked tight and options for kids these days seems sooo limited. (And lets face it this whole article is pointing at the younger generation. My girlfridns daughter is always on myspace, after school that’s all she does… I don’t care really that she’s always on it, but I talk to her and she’s always telling me how bored she is…I’m always telling her to go visit her friends and she just wont… every time . When she does have friends over, their both on myspace talking to their friends ( I mean WTF!!). When me and my misses have fun and she gets “cut” because we are doing something. She tells me she hates how “we” have fun and she doesn’t. I just wonder how the hell you can get like that… I don’t see facebook and the like as a bad social experience in itself, but if you take these away what are the kids going to do, because from the hundreds of kids I’ve seen on it over the years, they just can’t socialise any other way (to a degree). [FONT="]Sorry for the rant, but yeah… [/FONT]
Yeah It's very different though for early teenagers.. when they 'discover' means of communication like myspace and msn they really get into it.. before my brother turned 15 he showed absolutely no interest in the internet... then suddenly.. , at the beginning of year 10, he starts going on msn, and 'adding' people from school... and now.. he's really interested in girls (he never really thought much of them beforehand), procrastinates on his homework and tries to get out of other commitments so he can stay on the computer (which is very unlike him, he used to be commited to school and all he ever wanted to do in his spare time was go out to his mates place to hang out). I've noticed a pattern though.. as I was the same way when I was his age.. I used always be on the computer.. constantly.. it'd be the first thing I'd do in the morning and the last thing I do at night.. it was very consuming. It's only been the past year or so where I've pretty much gotten over the whole myspace/facebook thing (I deleted my myspace a month or so ago because it was just so .. fruitless, lol) and as for msn.. I don't really use that much either.. I'm on wf.org and deviantart. a fair bit.. but that's more because it ties in with my hobbies. I don't know. I do agree however that over-use of the internet certainly does not lead into or create positive outcomes.. I know that in my last relationship, I had a huge problem with the fact that when I'd come over to my boyfriend's house to spend time with him, he'd always be playing a computer game, or chatting online (while I sat by him and watched), and it seemed no matter what I said about it, or what I suggested, I'd still end up sitting next to him, watching him online.
You know, the worse thing you can do to a child is neglect them. You know you can yell, scream and kick-out when your angry and all they'll do is give you that stupid look of "you idiot" and bugger off. But if you neglect them, boy, do they get cut or what. I'm ganna make a comment that'll probably get people ruffled up. But i think the older generation has put this on themselves. How much over the last few decades have working hours gone up. Longer hours, more stressful working environments, less time at home and family. I just think kids these days are so neglected at home. And the internet is the late 21st century tv. Everyone has it (if you don’t, good luck), so kids being as curious as they are, find stuff....and hello ....does facebook/myspace ever neglect the kids. Hell no....not when you have thousands of friends on it. Obviously i'm not talking about everyone, probably just a minority etc. Just thinking out. *Sorry can't sleep and i actually had this kind of talk not long ago with my gf* [FONT="][/FONT] [FONT="] [/FONT]
I think that as well. Alot of kids are growing up without the attention and support they need, so they consequentially go and look for it in other places and what's a cheaper and easier place to get it than the internet? A reason why I used the internet so much when I was younger was because my Dad walked out when I was 13 and never made any effort at all to contact me or my brother again, and my Mum, well, she went bonkers from the stress of it all and had a mental breakdown.. and you know when you're 13 and both your parents aren't there for you and your brother is too young to know the difference.. where else can you go other than the internet?
I'm not a fan of Facebook or Myspace or other such sites, but this is just poppycock. The modern human already lives in a manner completely unrelated to that which evolved the modern body 100,000 years ago, the model we still use today, unchanged. These warnings of, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" assume that the human paradigm, right now, this second, is the one and only correct one, and that all changes from this paradigm lead to chaos. Foolishness. No paradigm of the human condition lasts for more than the moment in which it is described. It is out of date before the sentence describing it has to come to its full stop. If these panic mongers wish for us to live as we are truly meant to live, the way our bodies (endocrine systems, circadian rhythms, levels of hormones and all that other balderdash) were evolved to function, then I entreat them to give up every single scrap of culture and go live butt naked on the plains of eastern Africa whence we came. Only there, in that life, does what they have to say make any sense.
Don't you see?? You're protecting your own lifestyle, no, culture. This is the culture which that guy is saying is bad; all day staring at a screen. Yes, he is a moron, but he thinks that facebook is the most popular site for children thus it's his example. Really he's just getting at the whole damned culture and I can't say I blame him. It causes cancer, although I expect it has a very small effect but he is right to use it to an extent. Why do all cigarette packs have messages like "You're going to die if you smoke this product!!", hmm? To scare people in order to enlighten them as when you get scared you usually back off to look at the whole picture and so you see the negatives as well.
I have to agree with Wreybies on this one. We've had people like him getting on soapboxes for quite a while now. Now it's about how social websites are destroying society, before that it was television rotting people's brains, before that graphic novels turned kids into criminals and before that it was that horrible "devil music." If it's really bad for society it'll die out after a while when the next big thing comes along. If it lasts for a few generations like those other things I mentioned, then it really wasn't that bad. Besides, a lot of us live in small towns where you don't have places to meet new people. Unless you want to count McDonalds and Wendy's.
So have comic books, the Twist, X-rated movies, and video games. The villain changes, but the rhetoric remains the same.
Well, my escapism from a hideous boarding school environment was reading, but I mean reading obsessively. Much more anti-social than the Internet, really. At least if we'd had the Net back then I would have been able to keep in touch with my old friends a bit. But my reading wasn't seen as a problem by the teachers (just the other kids thuoght I was wierd).
It is because of MySpace and Facebook that I have reconnected with people I otherwise would never have spoken to again. I have found people from college, high school, and junior high. I value these reconnections. I also use it to leave messages for friends between visits, make plans to get together, do invitations for events. There are ways to use these tools to make and maintain real connections with people. I think that social networking sites can be very important for people who do not have the opportunity or ability for face time. My brother is autistic and pretty agoraphobic, but online, he has found people with similar interests and problems. These are the closest things to friendships he has. As for myself, I was raised in a household that did not allow going out or dating. AOL (which was the big deal at the time) gave me a social life I wouldn't otherwise have had. That said, anything in excess can be detrimental. If someone is spending all their time online and never sees or talks to people face to face, they are missing out on some vital connections. If a person spends exorbitant time online, it can also be a problem. I know someone who was fired for MySpacing at work and not getting assignment completed. I don't think there is anything wrong with social networking sites themselves. They, like anything else we use for recreation, can be overdone.
The same thing happened to my mom. Her high school was shut down two yeras after she graduated, so she was never able to reconnect with her high school friendds with family reunions and such. She joined facebook, and found a "group" for her high school, and now is going to a reunion for her class. Which is something she always talked about doing. She also found friends from when we lived in Germany (who ended up staying at our house for a weekend) and lots of other people she used to know. My mom and dad use it to chat when Dad is out of town. The list goes on. As for it causing cancer, I agree with Wrey and everyone else who says that's crazy.
