Originally Facebook was founded as a social media platform where you can chat with your friends, share pictures and let your friends know what you are doing. But soon after Mark Zuckerburg founded Facebook, people started to share a lot of funny videos with bloopers or just sport videos. Facebook was meant to be a platform where users could share their own videos, like their own football skills or videos of their new-born baby for example. Nowadays Facebook seems to be a kind of YouTube, there are hardly interesting posts of friends in which they tell you what they are doing. When I open my Facebook app on my mobile phone the first thing I see when I am scrolling through my timeline are videos, a lot of videos. Should Facebook take measures to reduce the amount of videos on Facebook or is this also what we are calling a social media platform?

There is something to say for both sides, on the one hand it has nothing to with socializing with your friends. Nowadays you have to search for some status updates of your friends among all those videos, pictures and memes of Facebook accounts like 9GAG. When you have a lot of friends every minute there are some new videos on your timeline, that’s because Facebook shows you all the videos that one of your friends had liked. The most annoying about these posts is the fact that you can’t find anything back, when you saw a nice picture or video and you want to watch it again it’s almost impossible.

But on the other hand it is also very funny, when you are bored you can always keep scrolling through your timeline and watch some funny videos. Maybe without these videos and pictures Facebook was a lot more boring and maybe that will cause less Facebook users. When there were no videos on Facebook, only personal accounts it would be very boring on Facebook. Then you will have once in an hour a new post, so when you are bored you can’t just go and scrolling through your timeline.

So I think Facebook should not take measures to reduce the amount of videos on Facebook, because I think that will lead to less popularity of the social media platform. The only thing Facebook probably can do is just show you the videos of Facebook pages you liked  and not all the videos that your friends do like. For me it is sometimes really nice to relax and watch the most stupid videos in my spare time. What do you think about all these videos in your timeline?

There are so many negative stories about social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it isn’t good for your social life and it will cause cyber-bullying are two negative arguments given about social media platforms. But there are also a lot of positive things on social media. This blog is about one of these strengths of Facebook, searching for missing people through this social media channel. I have chosen this subject because lately I saw a lot of Facebook posts of different police departments about missing children. They asked the followers to share the messages to reach as much as possible Facebook users. I was wondering if all these posts, shares and comments would help to find the missing person. Is Facebook able to help agencies like the Police to find missing people?

A few weeks ago, when I was looking on my Facebook timeline, I saw a post about a missing girl again. Normally I don’t read the whole story, but in this case it was a girl who lives in the same village as where I live. She had taken the bus and the underground to the railway station Rotterdam Centraal and from that moment she was traceless. This was the second time in a short period that the girl was missing, so her father immediately started an action on Facebook to find his daughter. In one day the message was already shared for over two hundred times and the national media were also posting the story on their timeline. This was astonishing to see how many people helped the parents and the police to find the girl, even in foreign countries people were sharing the posts. And all these shares and media attention through social media led to the fact that the girl was recognized in London and the police brought her back to home.

This is one of the examples of searching for missing people through social media platforms, especially Facebook. It’s incredible to see what the results of the shares and comments are so you can conclude that Facebook is a good method to search for missing people. There are a lot of similar situations and agencies like the police are using social media more and more for purposes like this. These examples shows one of the strengths of social media: together you are stronger!

I think this is a really good alternative for traditional media like sharing printed photos or spread the story through mouth to mouth. In this way the story will reach a lot of people in a very short time, even in foreign countries and that could be the solution as you can see in the example. So in my opinion the police should continue with it, what is your opinion about this?

Sources:

http://tweakers.net/nieuws/103795/facebook-gaat-amber-alert-meldingen-aan-alle-nederlandse-gebruikers-tonen.html

Nowadays Social Media plays an important role in our life, we are using it to keep in touch with our friends and make some new friends. Besides that we want to show the world what we are doing by means of posting pictures or videos. These tools are all very useful, but do they control our life too much? A few years ago Social Media wasn’t that big yet, but nowadays people are able to use it for almost anything in their daily life. Why would people buy CD’s when we have youtube? Why would people buy newspapers when we have Facebook and Twitter? When you just wake up and open your eyes, you don’t have to go out of bed to see what’s going on in the rest of the world. Everything looks and feels easier to do with social media.

But is the impact of social media in our daily life too much? Browsing on Social Media websites can make you feel connected to a larger community, but according to Steven Strogatz of the Cornell University this is a false sense of connection. Social media can make it difficult for us to distinguish between important relationships from the real world and normal relationships formed through social media. Due to our social media relationships there will be a higher chance that our most meaningful relationships will weaken. The second negative impact of social media is that especially children are very sensitive for cyber-bullying. Through social media it’s easier for bullies to terrorize their victims anonymously and this will tend to deep mental scars at the people who are getting bullied. The phenomena Cyber-bullying is growing very fast the last years, nowadays 42% of the children is reporting that they have been victims of bullying. The main reason of suicidal thoughts is the anonymity that the bullies afforded online and that is all with the help of social media websites.

Social media causes not only problems for individual people, it’s also a problem for many businesses nowadays. Social media websites are very useful for companies to keep in touch with their customers and get some important information about them, but there is also a negative side. There will be a chance that employees are more interested in their own personal Facebook timeline than in their work tasks. It will decrease the work productivity when people are influenced the whole day by social media instead of more important things. A research of Morse claimed that only British companies lost 2.2 billion a year due to social networking sites.

The fact is that there are advantages and disadvantages of social media. I think you can’t say that is controlling our life too much, because nowadays it is very important and in the future it will be more and more important. So in my opinion we have to continue with social media and tools like that, but we have to be aware of the influence of social media.

Sources:

http://www.voicesofyouth.org/en/posts/how-strongly-can-social-media-influence-and-control-people-s-lives-

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/negative-effect-social-media-society-individuals-27617.html