Other Uses for Social Networking

Topic: Social Networking
Style: Comparison

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, can be utilized for many different reasons. Most people use them to reach out to past friends, stay connected with current friends, or meet new people who become friends. Though I use this site to connect to my family and friends, it has more become a major source of otherwise hard to find and scattered information for me. Compared to many people on Facebook I have a small number of “friends” on my list. Twenty-five percent of which are family members with the rest being current friends, old school mates or past co-workers that became friends. There is not a single person on my page that I do not or did not have a connection with face to face beforehand. But having the site for social reasons is not my primary use of it.
Before becoming a member on Facebook, if I wanted to learn about a subject that interested me it would take great effort to find the information I was looking for. At times it could take hours of researching through various search engines and many different websites to get the information I was seeking. I would find bits and pieces of data in many places that would then need to be strung together to get a cohesive picture of my findings.
The issue of validating sources was also a time consuming chore that often would slow my progress in achieving my answers. There are many self-proclaimed professionals that upload things to the World Wide Web. Information on the internet can easily be labeled as a fact whether it is one or not. Therefore I would be taken off my path of learning to check the validity of the source.
Another issue that would often arise would be the vague search results provided by the search engines. These programs would take pieces of the whole topic that I would enter and consider them relevant. Then I would need to begin the tedious task of sorting out the pages that pertained to my original search.
Since becoming a member of Facebook gathering the information I would like to learn about has become so easy. There is this wonderful feature where a person can “like” a page and be connected to all the information that the person who created that page generates. All I need to do is seek out pages that contain my interests and the information is right there for me. Also by becoming a member on their page I have access to the pages that they are connected to as well. This gives me near infinite sources and more information.
Using Facebook to connect with the professionals that create these pages makes validating my sources so much easier. I only need to validate one source and then be confident in relying on all new information they have. A bonus to this would be that professionals often network with others like them, therefore the people associated with their pages are often simple to validate as well.
The best part of using Facebook for this purpose is having the information come to me as opposed to me searching it out. It just shows up on my page and I can explore it further if I choose to do so. This eliminates the need to rely on any search engine, and their vague results, to find answers to questions I may have on a specific topic.
To me, using the medium of social networking as a tool to further my education has helped me immensely. It takes less time to attain reliable information that I can quickly implement in my life. Facebook has afforded me all this plus the ability to stay in touch with my loved ones.