Facebook: The End of Friendship As We Know It

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Facebook: It's The End of Friendship As We Know It (and I feel fine)

Manjoo’s essay 'Is Facebook a Fad' provides extensive insight into various social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Based on statistics derived from Manjoo’s essay, we get to know that Facebook has over one billion active users and one half of them log into their accounts each day (Manjoo p.223). William Deresiewicz also eludes to this in his essay 'Faux Friendship'. As a result of so many people opting to turn to social networking sites, this in turn has made friendship to smoothly be integrated into the various new electronic lifestyles. One way that these sites poses an imminent threat to our ability to communicate face to face, is that, people have become so busy sending texts that they hardly don’t have time for their friends. For instance in America, studies have indeed confirmed that people with no close confidants have risen from one American in 10 people in 1985, to one in four thus making social networks a real threat (Deresiewicz p.478). Diverse effects of social networking. Alignment will be towards the the various issues and concerns sorrounding the social networking sites.

It’s important to note that social networking sites have indeed worsened our ability to find real friends. According to Deresiewicz, real friends should have an actual connection. On the other hand, social networking sites brought about an end to the traditional face to face friendship and as a result, people have lost the closeness that was associated with friendship. Thus by using social networking sites, people aren’t close to each other anymore but instead, what they have is a sense of connection rather than the actual connection hence ...

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...know that some of the things that we do are wrong. In other words, they don’t offer us the moral support that we require from our best friends whenever we are wrong, thus making this kind of new friendship seem like a waste of time or as a form of distraction from our real life (Deresiewicz p.474). It’s also possible to befriend everyone, but not be friends with anyone according to Deresiewicz essay on “faux friendship”. This is evident in that, the kind of friendship created in social sites tends to bring about a sense of connection but rather not the actual connection as in real life situation thus making it actually possible not to be friends with anyone (Deresiewicz p.477).

Works Cited:

Manjoo Farhad, “Is Facebook A Fad?” pg 222 – 226.

Deresiewicz William, “Faux Friendship” pg 470 - 480

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