Experiment Info

For my 30 day proposal I decided to cut out all use of Face Book, for all 30 days. For me Face Book has been away to communicate with old friends and maybe family members I have not seen in a while. Actually, I have old friends on there and I do not even talk to them. However through Face Book I have learned about new Cause and Events as well as being able to socialize and I also use it for procrastination. It helps me procrastinate because while am doing my homework, or work on papers, I seem to always end up on Face book. I do not know why I go on there, I guess it is a way to distract me as well. I also use it to know what other people are up to and what are they doing with their lives. I go on Face Book at least five to six times, or even more, during those times people update their statues, so it’s interesting to see what people are doing. Since I get invited to a lot of events of Face Book as well as catching up with friends, I wanted to see how one will be able to communicate with friends or get invited to events, without having the use of Face Book. Will the friends call them, or decide to shoot them an e-mail? I wanted to try no Face Book for 30 days because I have heard of so many cases of people’s communication skills.

The social issue I want to find out is; how people’s communication skills can be better or worse without the use of Face Book. I did some research and found a site where the University of Minnesota’s Christine Greenhow mention “students using social networking Web sites (Face Book) are practicing the 21^st century skills needed to be successful in today’s society.”(http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2008/08/06/study facebook improves commun.aspx). In some ways I do believe that is true, because a lot of the things we are doing are technology based. It seems as if a majority of people only use technology to communicate, so the older folks seem to be stooping down to the younger generation’s level and using Social Networking websites, but they already know how to communicate verbally. However for the younger people or those who have to communicate, is it really okay for them to not talk face to face with someone. To me communicating to your friends is great over the internet, but will those people who use it, often, lose their verbal communication skills in order to talk to someone face to face? For a business interview, I can guarantee they would not have an interview over the internet or Face Book. Another website I went to, a lady mentions “They can hardly talk to the opposite sex in person, but can chat with them easily online,” am not saying that the social websites are to find you “soul mate”, (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=facebook&st=cse). However people can act very different in person rather than in person. They way we even write can be an issue, now I am not saying that am a good writer, but for classes I at least spell out my words, and not use things like b/c w/ etc… As for the 21^st century, people who use Face Book are using internet communication skills and they are probably excellent. As for verbal communication skills are they as high as they could be? Also would people go out and go to events if they did not have face book?