I was extremely relieved to read Janet Street-Porter’s article, ‘Why I Hate Facebook’. How refreshing to find somebody with the same view as myself.
Firstly, I strongly agreed with her statement that “nothing sums up the shallow world we live in more than a group of people chatting away to each other for hours each day!” She couldn’t be more accurate. Many people are guilty of wasting hours of their lives sitting on their computers, alone in their rooms hour after hour, damaging both their eyesight and posture while they participate in meaningless conversations. In my opinion, people today are more interested in a world of disastrous complaints and debates about other people’s lives rather than appreciating their own. It would surely…show more content… She comments on the difficulty of “chatting without hearing the tone of their voice or reading their gestures and facial expressions”, stressing that it is impossible to understand the way something is meant - angrily, sarcastically, light-heartedly … It can lead to countless misunderstandings. I know of many arguments that have been caused as a result of misinterpreting the tone in which something has been said on social media. Conversations are all about expressing ourselves. You can’t really show how you are feeling by using an emotion. Sometimes it’s only when you’re with a friend, face to face, that they’ll open up and tell you about any problems they’re having.
Another issue Street-Porter draws our attention to is the fact that social media websites give rise to bullying worldwide. She points out that “scores of children are bullied by others who send them stream of abusive or threatening messages.” There is no doubt that websites like Facebook allow bullies to pursue their helpless victims 24 hours a day. Worse still, they can do it anonymously or using a fake identity so that it impossible to deal with. Cyberbullying is yet another means for such people to get their kicks. Cowardly? Yes. Life-destroying? Yes. Easy to deal with?