Are Social Networks Good For Our Children?

Social networks definitely became a part of our day-to-day life. But when it comes to younger generation it looks like social networks are not just a part, but something more comprehensive and important in their lives. Let’s try to assess potential benefits and negatives of the social networks for our children:

Benefits:

1.      Despite of widespread opinion that social networking is a nothing more than a time-killer for students, recent researches discovered educational benefits of social networking. Study reveals that students tend to learn much of their technology and communication skills from online networking resources such as Facebook, MySpace, etc. Particulalry this way of learning efficient for low-income students.

2.      Another positive point for social network users is that they are surely more globally aware with immediate access to latest global issues. Furthermore online socializing develops perspective-taking, decision-making and critical thinking skills, with the latter is almost unaccessible to our youngsters at schools and universities.

3.      Social networking sites offers students the opportunity to create a positive self-image. The profiles gives them a chance to create the image of themselves that they want people to see by putting their best qualities “out there.”

4.      Social networks are also used as a good recruitment tool both my employees and employers. So having well regarded references and respected reputation of professional will open a huge oppurtunities in job seeking throughout your contacts network.

5.      Social network could turn into source of revenue for those youngsters who are trying to make some money with network marketing and affiliate programs. Advrertising through social network is often easy and effective rather than doing it by cold calling for example.

 Negatives:

1.       Students may get into trouble with University administrators for incriminating and inappropriate information or pictures on their social networking profiles that are violations of school policy or the code of conduct. They also may damage own reputation by posting some discreditable data or images of themselves.

2.       Obvious negative of all social networks is that young people getting used to it very fast and sometimes it becomes some sort of addiction rather than just a hobby. People who got themselves addicted to social networking waste plenty of their time to unnecessary chatting and surfing through network’s profiles. Such addiction may result also in psychological stress once social networks become unavaiable to related person.

3.       Due to the thorough connectivity of various members, people will be able to see their contacts which they may not want to reveal to others and thus these sites create holes in their privacy.

4.       There are many profiles on these sites which contain the objectional content and thus it fears lots of parents as their children get to see all that objectional content. There have been cases where people started abusing others and have gone so far that they took the photos uploaded and made changes in them using photo editing softwares and made them look nude and other sutff.