THE PROBLEM OF SNS Nowadays, more than 750 million people across the world use Facebook to share photographs and videos and post regular updates of their movements and thoughts. Millions have also signed up to Twitter, the “micro-blogging” service the lots members circulate short text and picture message about themselves. Herein that comes with the problem. Just like several of writers in Unit One of What Matters are critical of social networking sites, noting that these SNS promote self-centeredness, reduce our ability to cope with emotions, and cheapen what if means to be a friend.

Here are the reason why I agree with that. First of all, using Facebook just equals staring at yourself in the mirror, I think. Those who spent more time updating their profile on the social networking sites were more likely to be narcissists. Facebook provides an ideal setting for narcissists to monitor their appearance and how many “friends” they have. These kind of users care more about themselves. Usually they checked their Facebook several times per day. They changed their photographs frequently. They would like to be attracted attention by others. They hope they can cause everybody focus on them.

They feel they are the special one in the world. Indeed, they are not. They are only the ordinary people who lives on the earth. Secondly, some people who spend long time on the SNS will have the autism. “in a recent survey of incoming college freshmen, 87 percent favored watching TV and movies online instead of subscribing to a cable service, while 76 percent spent more than an hour a day on Facebook” (Benny Evangelista, August 22, 2011). Just because they spent so much time on that kind of social networking sites, they indulge all day in the fantasy and are separated from the reality.

When they face to the real world, they don’t dare to communicate with the human because they are lack of practice with the human being in the real world. They only trust the friend who always talks to him online. These kind of people are used to live with networking, they can’t handle their emotions without their favorite-SNS. They only like to talk to each other online-the virtual society. Finally, making more friends online will debase the real meaning for the friendship. Just like Christine Rosen said, “but ‘friendship’ in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real world friendship. ” (Christine Rosen, 2007).

They are proud of the numbers of making friends. They treat friendship as “philately”. On MySpace, you can easy to make friends through your acquaintances. Also, you can elevate or downgrade or entirely eliminate a relationship with a few mouse clicks one. In the traditional way, friendship is a relationship which, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts. Whereas, “friendship” on social networking sites is public, fluid and promiscuous. It focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know.

Basing on that, friendship becomes more and more cheapen on social networking sites. They even don’t need to meet each other in person before they become “friend”. This kind of friendship can’t last a long time. Maybe they can share the happiness, but they can’t face frustrations and solve the difficulty together. If they don’t, how they can be called “friend”. In one world, the social networking sites bring us a lot of convenience, at the same time, they also come up with opposite things. We need to treat they with correct attitude in order to avoid falling into the modern social trap.