A Positive View on Social Media and Facebook Essay

Over one billion people worldwide use or have a profile on some sort of social media. Facebook is one form of social media that leads the charge. Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows users to locate and reunite with old friends, join groups of members that share your same interests, do research, and entertain themselves through the use of a variety of applications embedded within the website. Every so often we feel the urge to locate old friends that we have not been in touch with in a long time. We just type in their name and see what comes up. One day my wife looked up an old friend of mine, Paul Z. and found a man about the right age. She thought at first it was someone else because with age we all look different. Looking back at her was an older man with grey hair and a beard, something that neither Paul nor I had the last time we had seen each other. So she started to go through pictures and started seeing familiar faces, pictures from the past that was our past too. She immediately requested that they become â€Å"friends† on Facebook knowing that this was our friend from years ago. The request was accepted and our friendship was reunited again. After Facebook and my wife reunited two old friends I started to look at Facebook for other ideas on who to try and communicate with. Old classmates came to mind and it just so happens that Facebook provides a tool fo r reuniting classmates on the website. After about ten minutes or so of answering a few simple questions about where I went to school and when, I logged off and went about my business. About two or three days later I started getting responses. At first I didn’t recognize anybody, but then after a little research, yearbooks mostly, I started to recognize some of the names and memories followed. I have since been in touch with a couple of classmates from as far back as second and third grade, an amazing feat since second and third grade was in 1966 and 1967. I now get invitations to class reunions and other events that I never had before. Although I haven’t attended one yet, maybe someday I will. Another part of Facebook that I thoroughly enjoy, are all the groups that are available to join and hang out with. The Navy is just one of the many groups that I belong to. There I get to chat and share the many memories I have from my time in the service. Some are really great, like the time I got to ride a camel in front of the main Pyramid in Egypt, except when it spit on me, that wasn’t fun. Or the time I rode a Gondola in Venice down the waterways. And some not so great, like 1991 in the Persian Gulf or rescuing refugees off the coast of Haiti. But all are memories I love to share with old shipmates and Facebook makes it possible. Genealogy is a subject that has interested me for years. One of the greatest challenges I have found, is how to quickly and accurately research the information I need on members of my family. I even subscribed to an online genealogy website. Where, for $30.00 per month, I could do all the research I wanted. This soon became more than I could fit into my budget, so I started to look for another way. I saw an advertisement on Facebook for a new application called â€Å"Family Tree†, an online web app that allows family members to input their own family information and merge it into an existing family tree. It also allows each family member to visit and update their own part of the tree as often as they like. I signed up and started to enter information about my own immediate family and forwarded requests for other members of my family to join. The response was amazing. To date my family has placed 1,288 entries into the family tree and it continues to grow every day. Although groups, family history research, locating long lost friends takes up a lot of time, I still try to find ways to amuse myself on the computer. Facebook can do that too. There are literally hundreds of games that you can play either by yourself or with family and friends. CityVille 2 is the one that I am currently involved in socially. I haven’t started any individual games yet, but I will eventually. Games are not the only forms of entertainment provided by Facebook. The posts that all of my friends place on the site can be hilarious. I am constantly looking at all of the photos and videos that have been posted and at times they can be pretty entertaining as well. All things considered, there are many ways to communicate with family, friends and classmates. Newer forms of social media, like Facebook give us a significantly more effective and in most cases, less expensive way to stay in touch with the people that mean the most to us. It can also provide tools for exploring new and exciting ways to entertain ourselves, research your family history by starting a family tree, or join a group that shares your interests. The opportunities are endless.