Consequences of Online Social Networking

Anything we do in life has its' consequences, whether it is done in face to face interaction or online and especially online. Why online especially? Once we put something online, it is no longer part of our territory, anyone and everyone can have access to it on the web. Even if we set our settings to private, there are people on the internet, who specialize in "hacking" into computers and finding information through databases. This then leads into the article on the "Consequences of Online Social Networking" that primarily the title speaks for itself. I learned how it discusses researches and measures conducted on those associated with topics such as anxiety, self-esteem, body image, gender and the statistics and preliminary results found from these studies. Social networks such as Facebook was used as a compare and contrast on how young adults view themselves in body image and self-esteem and how that is linked to how they portray themselves online.

What I found interesting and useful about this article was how under self-esteem, how hypotheses were conducted as followed, such as for example, "people with lower self-esteem will have fewer social contacts in their networks" versus "people with higher self-esteem will have more strangers (contacts who were not previously met face-to-face) in their social networks" (Acar, 68). I never really thought about Facebook and how individuals may be portrayed as to the possibility of having not too many friends may be part of self-esteem issues. I thought this whole time those who do not have many contacts/networks on their profiles are because they are only talking to people they know personally, to reconnect and they feel they do not need that networking aspect to feel better about themselves. This article gave me a new outlook and perspective that I am now more aware of.