For all the time I’ve spent messing around on Facebook when I should’ve been working, I’ve never, ever regretted signing up for it. There’s no doubt that the social opportunities that Facebook provides were critical in helping me emerge from my shell in high school to become the confident and sociable individual I am now. In addition, Facebook has allowed me to keep my connections with people I don’t see very often strong.
One of the biggest reasons Facebook is great is that it makes forming connections and maintaining them just so easy. In real life, it can often be difficult to establish an actual connection with people you are acquaintances with but don’t know that well, especially if you have social anxiety (like I used to). On Facebook, familiarizing yourself with someone was as easy as adding them as a friend and commenting on some of their posts. Generally speaking, so long as you possessed the social niceties necessary to actually make good conversation, online discourse would substantially facilitate in-person communication whenever you saw the individual in question. Through online discourse via Facebook, I deepened my interpersonal relationships in real life. I also familiarized myself with the vast majority of my peer group — even if I didn’t truly know someone, for most of the kids who I shared a sufficient number of friends with, we were aware of each other. Thanks to Facebook, the world seemed a lot less incomprehensible and a lot more familiar. By observing Facebook activity and photos, I could generally tell who was in the same group of friends as someone else, what people were generally interested in, what their relationship status was, and other handy information that I would not have known without significant investigation in real life.
Likewise, it can be very hard to maintain friendships with people whom you rarely see in person without some convenient means of continued contact. Letter writing, phone calls, Skype, and other methods of person-to-person communication are valuable for continuing discourse with immediate family members or individual friends, but the amount of time and effort that goes into them substantially limits the number of individuals one can keep in contact with. I’m a very social person, and I traversed numerous social circles in high school. Plus, I like the idea that someone doesn’t have to have been your closest friend for you to be interested in their life and them in yours. I believe it should be possible to keep in contact with friendly acquaintances as well as close friends. Facebook, by providing a broad domain of continued interactions, allows me to stay in touch with hundreds of friends and friendly acquaintances. I don’t have to choose a previous few ties to keep while cutting the rest — I can stay in touch with my old life while immersing myself in my new life.
Is it perfect? Certainly not. Do I use it as a procrastination tool far too often? You betcha. Do I need a break from it sometimes? Definitely! Do I take those breaks? Yes. In the long run, however, I would never permanently deactivate my Facebook (barring tremendous changes in the future) because of all the good it’s done me in creating and preserving friendships. Used properly, Facebook is a tremendous asset the likes of which had never truly been realized before.
