Most of today's Internet users are active in so-called "social networks", sites which specialize in connecting people, either by letting them send messages or pictures or by enabling them to play online games together and comment on each other's articles or photos.
Social Networks Have Enormous Popularity
Because many people are engaging in this kind of online activity on social networks, they advocate the enormous benefits of either Facebook's strategy of keeping in touch with old friends or Twitter's idea of seeing what current friends are up to with a certain success, and more and more people are signing up for these services, especially as they are completely free and often financed through advertising, like MySpace and Facebook.
However, skeptics are always present, especially when a phenomenon such as social networking is rapidly gaining in momentum through its enormous number of users. As with every new kind of communication or media services, the exact effect it has on humans has yet to be assessed scientifically, but many researchers are already warning people of eventual health risks resulting from social networking.
Uncharted Health Risks and the Impact of Mobile Technology
Such eventual health risks can only be correctly evaluated in the long term, but especially the Internet's young audience seems more and more addicted to such services. It is not at all unusual hearing from teenagers and young adults that no day goes by without them connecting at least once to Facebook or Twitter. Further development of mobile applications and mobile Internet devices such as modern mobile phones, the iPhone or netbooks highly increases the general availability of social networking services and Internet in general.
Continuous Flow of Infinite Information
One major problem of social networks could be the way in which they present information. As Facebook and Twitter provide a "status" feature which lets users communicate their current thoughts/activity in a single sentence or a few words, the information flow which reaches every user is enormous, rapidly updating and highly condensed.
This can be detrimental to their user's moral sense, modern scientists say: Every interaction with others needs time, and the processing of the received information is often related to ethics. For instance, when a person learns about the depression of a close friends, she has to process this information in order to feel sorry for her friend. At other times, when a person meets new people who show high talent in some way, she has to learn to admire them, because this can only be done by rethinking and a thorough processing of what her senses captured during their encounter.
Lack of Time Results in Changed Behaviour
Social networks don't give their users the time to assess the value of each status update. The current incoming of new information forces the user to pass on to the next one without reconsidering what he just read or saw. In the long run, such a habit forms insensitive and numb personalities, as they are reading the most intimate and sometimes most horrible details of other's lives without the need of reacting to them as they would have to in a real conversation.
Consequences for the Social Networking Concept
This evolution could be very counterproductive for the initial concept of social networks; instead of bringing people closer together, they connect users on a level without emotions and without deeper thoughts or interactions, thus slowly contributing to a world of men and women who don't care about each other anymore.
Other rapidly changing media like TV or Internet videos are another example of this: The more dead people are shown in TV and the violence is shown on Youtube, the easier people can look at them, and the less they sense while looking at them.
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