The Disadvantages of Facebook

The amount of active worldwide Facebook users as of June 2012 is 955 million, accounting for approximately a seventh of the total population on Earth. With such a mass population of the world checked into Facebook, it sparks question as to what kind of effect this has. There is no doubt that Facebook itself is a fantastically engineered social media, connecting just about one billion of people in the world with the simple action of logging into a website. But with the rapid growth of this social media, it comes to the question of what exactly the effects could be on teenagers, the age population that accounts for the largest part of these billion users. Despite Facebook being a positive tool, it has a strikingly terrible effect on teenagers today, being a behemoth of a time consumer, is causing communication downfall, is a mass root of conflict, and is giving birth to a new generation of unmotivated followers.

It’s been a long day at school, 7 long hours of your teachers attempting to ram pages worth of information into your brain. Your first priority is very likely not going to be diving into the homework that you’ve been given to complete for the next day. So you check into Facebook and claim you’ll only be on for about 15 minutes. 45 minutes later, after diving into a conversation with your best friend over the chat about a new music video, commenting on a plethora of pictures and statuses your friends posted, you realize you went a little above what you expected. But that’s okay, it’s only 45 minutes, which is perfectly harmless. But do the math. Those 45 daily minutes you spend rack up to about 5 and a half hours a week, then to a monstrous 21 hours in a month. That’s almost a full day’s worth of Facebook. Now, maybe one would oppose and say that that’s not even a terrible amount of time. But what is it that you’re actually accomplishing by scrolling through your news feed on Facebook? Honestly, nothing. If this amount of time students spent on Facebook