Azza Zarour- With friends like these

In the article “with friends like these” Hodgkinson criticizes facebook focusing more on its negative effects. In his article, he talks about how facebook became a very important part of our daily life, how facebook changed our social life, and how people bases their judgments upon others depending on their facebook accounts; based on their status, on how many friends they have, and their use and updates for their profiles. He says that people trusted the creators of the facebook “Geeks from California” and gave them their information without thinking deeply about the consiquences of that. Moreover, he emphasizes on the idea of connection, people became very disconnected rather than connected. The ideas of Frank Webster shows in Hodgkinson's article. The idea of “quantitative and qualitative” information. He explains how people became obsessed with the number of friends they have. To them, the more friends you have on your account the better but most of the people do not think of the quality of their friends.

I agree with Hodgkinson that we became disconnected form each other, and that some people nowadays bases their own judgmens upon others based on their facebook accounts. However, I disagree with him about the private information point. If we do not want to give our information we can easily not write them down when we start the account, we even can change them or delete some of the information about ourselves whenever we want.

I have my own experience about privacy in facebook. I loved the way the organizers of the facebook dealt with it. The story is that someone created a facebook account with my name and picture. He started to invite people to join his account as if it was me. What I did is that I wrote a status asking my friends not to add him and I reported him, and also my friends did to the organizers. When the people in charge saw that so many people reported this person they deactivated his account.

I wish Hodgkinso talked more about the facebook advantages. Facebook helped us a lot in so many different ways; it helped us use our time if we use it in the right way, it helped us know what are the latest activities and made the far places seem very close to us. But I am very convinced that we should all use it wisely and not to spend hours just chatting. In other words, not be addicted to it !

                           

please let me know what do you think. I will be happy to get your comments.
love you all :) :) :)
Azza