Social networks taking over!

Increase of social networks in the previous years caused less personal (real-life) interactions between people. Not just young ones, but older ones too. Today, users of social networks are the majority in the community and if you don't own a Facebook or at least Twitter account, you're not cool and society takes you as a mid-evial person who doesn't know what is going on in the 21^st century. But the truth behind it is, that if you don't own a social network account, you're more sociable, you go out more and have more personal contact with others. Studies show, that almost every teenager owns an account on at least one of the large internet community sites and uses it every day to share thoughts, photos, videos, ideas etc. That means that you don't need to call a friend and say: "Hey, what's up? I came up with an idea, let's meet somewhere for a coffee.", but you just share it on your network. Every one who follows you or is your friend will recive this information and that gets the job done. That's how personal contacts started and that's how social networks ruinded it. People today don't appreciate a walk with someone and talk somewhere in personal, when they can tell and show everything they want to the other by using Facebook or Twitter. Spending every single free minute on internet and social networks became their daily routine. Why would you talk by a coffee in a café if you can make your own coffee at home and talk to your friends and collegues over the internet. You don't even have to move much because it requires only few moves with your hand on the keyboard and mouse. Even falling in love became a part of social networks. Meeting a girl/boy over the internet is much simpler than go into a club and try to start a conversation with her/him. People are often too embarrassed to start a talk with opposite sex, so they rather do it over the internet, where they don't have to look in to the other person's eyes and say what they mean and feel. I agree that is much easier to do it that way, but getting to know eachother and maybe fall in love or starting a relationship lost it's beauty. Internet dating used to be popular for a bit older part of the community, therefore called "Lonely hearts" who were looking for a soulmate on one of the networks with such service. But today we can see that this became a popular thing for teenagers and young people too. Song by The F'ups "Lazy generation" was right. We are getting more lazy every day and social networks are helping us to waste even more time. It's sad to see, that young people today rather spend their time in front of a computer and talk to friends virtually instead of going in to the park or for a coffee. I'm not wondering that people aren't even able to speak normally to a person, because of the influence caused by social networks which addicted us. We are loosing that sense for other people because interactions aren't genuine anymore and that doesn't lead to anything good despite the fact that communication is still going on. Even though I'm a user on Facebook, I think that without it we would live more free and not letting people get so much personal data of us, such as pictures, videos etc. Of course there were other social networks before Facebook, one of them was Myspace, but it wasn't built for everyday communication. Facebook is spreading like a plague and it's got approximately 600 milion users. Imagine that amount of people connected to a single network and no wonder that it spreads this fast. Let's just hope that in 50 years we won't be just sitting in front of our computers and post everything that happened to us at that very moment.

Nejc Črnko (Slovenia)