Facebook: Virtual addiction

Facebook is known as a very useful social tool by everyone in the world. A person with internet access will most likely have a facebook account or at least heard about facebook. I'm sure that at least 90% of teens that have an internet connection will have a facebook account. Facebook is used to keep in touch with people far away, or just with your regular friends. There are pictures, status updates, and many other ways to interact throught the internet. Having access to facebook from basically anywhere has made it possible to check our facebook accounts in a regular basis. We become sucked into the virtual world and begin to need our facebook accouts.

When we need to be connected to facebook to be at ease we know that this "social tool" has become an addiction. No addiction or excess is ever good. Checking too much facebook, and being all the time on facebook is very bad as as doing too much of anyhting. When you basically live through facebook you stop living your real life. There are real life cases of people who have become so sucked into facebook that rehabilitation is a must for this kind of people.

Facebook can get to be very useful and may help you keep in touch and stay connected to your loved ones. But there comes a time when you stop doing it out of need to keep in touch and start doing it out of the need to stalk people. Stalking is one of the issues people are afraid of when it comes to the internet, and the fact that facebook provides a great tool for this kind of privacy violation makes it not so safe. That is why we have to be very careful as to what we upload to this type of public web pages. Private information must not be published just like that, you have to upgrade security measures to avoid being checked by people who would want to do bad. You must be very careful when becoming a facebook user and the fact that many of us are means that we are very exposed to these kind of violations.

Puerto Rican Doctors in Haiti

As we know, Haiti has been needing help, especially doctors. Many countries from many different parts of the world send doctors to the devastated country to help people suffering from disease and injuries. But, the Puerto Rican case got my attention: They created a Facebook group in which they uploaded photos of their patients (without their permission obviously), dead people and even themselves with drink in their hands and guns from the Haitian military.

All started when the earthquake left thousands of injured and dead people, so Puerto Rico decided to send doctors and nurses, who went to Haiti willingly. Being there, they did help people, performed surgeries, among other things that needed to be done. But one day, some of these doctors had the wonderful idea of creating a group in Facebook named: "Salvemos a Haiti (Senado de Puerto Rico)". In this group, they uploaded not only their experiences, but also photos. In these photos, Haitian people appeared being attended by the doctors and even nude in some cases. In others, the doctors appeared in parties with alcholic drinks and guns. When they returned to Puerto Rico, they expected to be praised as heroes and instead, people criticized them and even damaged their properties. And this was known worldwide, since these photos were published in newspapers. Now, the authorities are thinking about removing them their licenses because they broke the ethic code of doctors. Sincerely, I hope they do.

By the way, I'm not publishing photos of Haitian people, but of the doctors. Haitian people don't deserve to be shown all around the Internet. And, now that I'm looking at these stupid, drunk, smiling doctors, I wonder if their patients are smiling as well.

Our second Social Life

Almost all people that have access to Internet, have a facebook account and that’s why I started thinking about this; It’s kind of interesting to know how does a network became the most popular site in the internet. I found out that it is becoming like our second lives, we upload our photos, we post our thoughts, we use it as a messenger (to communicate), we play games, and use it for many other things. That is the reason why we spend so much time in facebook.

I’ve noticed that it has changed our lives, sometimes in a better way but others in a negative way. The positive things for example are that we can have communication with our friends from other countries, see what’s happening in the social aspect (with the photos), and also use the free-time, but in the other hand it can be very dangerous if the person doesn’t know how to use it correctly because there are some people that besides doing what they’ve to do, they over-use facebook.

I think that facebook is like our second social live and that is has changed our style of life because today we are more connected within our groups of friends and now it’s easier to make friends because there’s no need to be face to face. Society has accepted that, and through the pass of time the world will be even more & more linked. I would like to learn more about this phenomena.