Calvin Poor
Mr.Ostlund English Profile
4 Mar. 2015
Do you have a Facebook account? Mostly likely you do because this is the 21St century and that's what people do to stay connected instead of actual conversations. It gives people a place to hide from actual life and stay behind the screen. You can do almost anything from the internet, you don't even need to leave your house to get food or make a living. So many good and bad things come from social media and Mark Zuckerberg has helped create this social phenomenon. He co-founded the social-networking website Facebook out of his college dorm room. Later he dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year, to focus more on the site. The site has now grown to more that 250 million users world wide, which made Mark a billionaire. Since he has all of this money he can now give back to the economy or donations to foundations ("Mark Zuckerberg Biography").
Creating the site also helps bring people together, but it is also a place where bad things can happen. Like the people who think they are "god" behind the screen, people who think that they control the world. Mark has always been interested in computers, while in college he created several websites including "Face mash". That was an example how the internet can be used for bad things. Which let students compare pictures to other students and see who is hotter. The site was later shut down by the school. Him and his college room mates began working on Facebook, this lead to several lawsuits after the site became successful. He then dropped out of school to continue to work and make the site better. He has changed peoples lives some for the good some for the not so good. So to start of I'm going to talk about the bad side of Facebook. The site features instant messaging which allows anyone to contact anybody. This allows people
to create fake profiles as in fake pictures and identity's and lure people in, there is even a show called "Catfish" that links to Facebook. Some kids now a days are stupid enough to go and meet up with these people in real life. Some times in can be fine but most of the times something goes wrong. You can never know who you are going to meet for all you know is could be a criminal. Its easy to hide your identity behind a screen but not in real life. Another thing is cyber bullying in which kids can cause harm to other kids over the internet. They aren't psychically harming them but they are mentally harming them and this can cause them to take action. By take action I mean like harming them selves or others. For example the school shootings that have happened in the past didn't just happen out of nowhere. Either the kid was getting bullied at school or on the computer, or he just had a bad life at home so he took it to school. It probably wasn't his intention for anyone to get hurt using this site. His main reason to make something like this site most likely was to link people together not turn them against each other. Or create a bad scenario for someone or something.
Besides creating Facebook he also created early versions of the app Pandora that allows people to listen to free music while listen to adds between them. I can see how the site can do good by bringing together long lost family and friends and this has really changed the world. Every body is use to doing things with tech. Now a days this is just a different way to connect with people all around the world. Facebook also allows you to create groups with friends and family members. In which you can set up events with them on a Facebook page and they can say if they want to go or not. You can even follow pages that you like to keep updated on what's going on with that group or thing. For example a few sites that I follow on Facebook are Bristlist which you sell general items to other members. Another group is a 4x4 buy, sell and trade site which helps me find parts for my Jeep and Dodge. Something else that can benefit companies is
they can advertise on the site because people will see it and want to share it with their friends. Stuff like this kind of spreads like a wild fire because it will just keep getting shared and will spread around fast, and all of these people will see it and be like I want that.
Knowing how the 21st centaury is you probably have a Facebook account, unless you are a hater like Mr.Oustlund (Just kidding , don't fail me). If you do you probably know about most of what I have been talking about in this essay. You have probably seen the stories people share about kids getting kidnaped and things like that from meeting on Facebook. This is also a good place for advertisements for big companies or events coming up. Mark Zuckerberg has really changed how we do things in our day to day lives. I've yet to determine if Facebook is a good or bad thing for the world. What do you think?
