1. Providing a false sense of closeness

The whole concept behind online “social networking” is to be connected to everyone, everywhere, all the time. There is nothing wrong with this concept; provides an inexpensive and easy way to keep in touch with distant relatives or friends who have moved. I like to keep up with what my fellow military members in Germany or Japan are doing through status updates. But should social media take precedence as the default method of staying in touch? Before MySpace, Facebook and Google+, it meant more when people kept in touch. Phone calls, personal letters, emails, special event announcements like weddings or graduations.

All of these differ from today’s status updates for one simple factor: they had a purpose. If someone called you on the phone to ask how you were doing, they showed that they cared enough to think of you specifically, pick up the phone, and have a polite conversation.

2. Replacing face-to-face communication

A status update is not directive. It’s just a thought, a jot down of someone’s day, thrown onto the Internet without direction or intention. And any answer is, well… just that. A meaningless comment on a meaningless trifle. In perhaps the most absurd example of this possible, my neighbor once complained that he could never talk to me again by posting in a status. My neighbor… who could walk to my front door and talk to me in person at any time in less than thirty seconds. People just don’t try as hard to maintain friendships when they can read about people’s lives online.

But if you read a status about an event happening in someone’s life, does that tell you how their life has progressed since you last spoke? The overwhelmingly common mindset seems to suggest yes. People take to tweets, status updates and blog posts as a satisfactory substitute for phone calls, personal letters, emails and (God forbid) actual face-to-face communication because this phenomenon has insidiously saturated our daily lives. Maybe it’s the same concept as considering artificial sweeteners like cane sugar. My mother often tells me that soft drinks taste different now than she did when she was a child in the 1960s. Will we soon be watching the incredulous eyes of the next generation when we talk about calling each other on the phone?

3. Permeable advertising… for everything imaginable

If you’ve watched TV or surfed the Internet in the last five years, chances are you’ve noticed that the rampant and unstoppable force that is the advertising business has become more ubiquitous than ever. Advertising is a legitimate business and a necessary sales strategy, as well as a great way to earn income if you have a way to generate content that you can advertise on. But, especially on the internet, ads have become maddeningly ubiquitous. I long for the days when you could get to a web page without stuff flying across the screen or listening to obnoxiously loud videos that put the late Billy Mays to shame.

I also miss being able to see a commercial (now there’s a bunch of words I never thought I’d put together) that doesn’t ask you to like a Facebook page. Businesses now offer discounts, rewards, coupons, special offers, and a host of other benefits in exchange for attention on their social media pages. They do this because the number of Facebook users is staggering, and because drawing attention to something tends to attract more attention, and more attention, and so on. If you haven’t figured this out yet, wait until the end of a commercial, when a major company displays its name or logo. Most of the time, somewhere in that image, there is a Facebook URL. Why is this necessary when probably every corporation in the developed world has its own website? Because it is another way of exerting its presence in the daily life of its consumers.

4. Breeding Narcissism

A few days ago, I participated in an online discussion about the negative side of Facebook for many of its users. My exact description is not what I would normally use in more formal writing, but I would say “a large cesspool of [attention seeking]socially deficient underage narcissists who think likes and comments are the holy grail of measuring self-esteem” is a pretty accurate description, albeit an exaggeration. Someone else responded with the argument that the same assessment could be made of any medium public that you facilitate You made a good point, but self-expression in the form of art, music, writing, and speech is (or at least should be) intended primarily for the benefit of the public. audience, instead of the ego of the creator. And I would hardly call expressive posting a scantily clad photo of oneself with the caption “Ugh, I’m so fat.” This problem is more common among younger audiences and can be easily circumvented by removing these offenders from viewing. But the trend still speaks to a latent psychological bias toward self-degrading behavior. And while Facebook may have become the symbol of the problem, it exists online in many forms, even spawning an opposite problem: cyber bullying.

5. Spreading those baby photos too much

It’s always been a custom that new parents want to share everything their wrinkly little monstrosity does. They show photos of Junior feeding, bathing, walking, playing with the dog. And in previous years, they were mostly restricted to showing them to people who really cared. In addition to the obvious concerns associated with sharing personal photos online, parents often take things too far when posting baby photos.

Those are captured moments meant for close family and friends, not the girl who lived down the hall in her sophomore year of college or the friend’s co-worker from last summer’s barbecue. I was even recently invited to a baby shower via Facebook, by a high school acquaintance. And he’s still in high school. Even among teenagers, who would have been scorned for their irresponsibility in decades past, it has become common practice to post ultrasound scans, baby photos and related events on Facebook as a way of announcing the child’s life to family and friends, and the rest of the world for people who don’t spend enough time reviewing their privacy settings. Some people just don’t seem to know when they’re sharing too much, or don’t consider who they’re sharing it with.

6. Make bullying socially acceptable

It’s usually a good idea to get to know someone before you get involved in a relationship, but it can easily be taken too far. “Facebook stalking” has become such a common activity that it was featured as the main plot line in an episode of the popular sitcom. how I Met Your Mother. Much of the issue revolves around browsing a victim’s photo albums for visual stimulation, if you can call someone who willingly posts such things in full view of the world a victim. But beyond the obviously creepy aspects of admiring a bikini-clad girl’s vacation photos, there’s something extremely unnerving about gathering information about a person online, rather than through conversation.

What is there to talk about on a first date when the other person has already learned everything about you from your Facebook page? Or even worse, how do you react when they tackle something they don’t like and only learned from the internet? in the episode of how I Met Your Mother, the main character (and biggest romantic failure ever) Ted Mosby meets a woman and asks her out, vowing to avoid knowing anything about her beforehand on the internet. He arrives in the middle of the night, does surprisingly well on the date, before giving in to temptation. His entire demeanor changes completely after learning of his dramatically too impressive life achievements through a simple Google search. Here’s some advice if you’re trying to have a meaningful, long-term relationship: Don’t do anything Ted does. Ever.

7. Devalue the concept of friendship

What does it mean to be friends? In my book, it means having an open, trusting, and platonic relationship with someone you would never hesitate to lend a helping hand to when needed. Just as an experiment, check your Facebook friends list and see how many people on it are really friends by that definition. I’ve had people add me on Facebook that I’ve only met once…or even not at all. I have old classmates, people I knew before I moved, friends of friends I met at social events. And mixed in with all of these are the few people you would consider true friends.

They don’t deserve that. These are people with whom I have grown, helped with difficult decisions, with whom I have shared intimate secrets. And they just show up on a list with a hundred other random acquaintances like they mean nothing more to me than some young high school student I helped with homework when I was a paraprofessional. Sometimes friendships can be formed online, allowing you to meet and interact with people you couldn’t otherwise. Some of my closest friends are people I met playing video games online. There are always different levels of friendship, but true friends should be respected rather than reduced to another meaningless status update on a news feed.