This week, my group presented to the class our findings for the Facebook project we have embarked on. We were to research addiction and identify various personality traits along with behaviors of an addict. We focused greatly on addictions outside of substance abuse such as gambling, the internet and pornography. In great relation to this, I came across an article on Time magazines website titled “Facebook: More Popular than Porn.” This immediately grabbed my attention because we identified in our presentation that porn is undoubtedly one of the biggest addictions identified in internet users. I was interested to see, then, why this author would compare Facebook to porn, and what types of people he identified to be such avid users of Facebook.
The article begins by discussing the popularity of Facebook among college students. He then points out that for the general population, pornography sites rank first in the most visited sites, followed by search engines. For the age group 18-24, though, this is not at all the case. Studies have shown for this group of users, social networking sites rank #1, followed by search engines, then e-mail based sites, with porn falling in fourth. Over the past few years, rates of users in social networking sites such as Facebook continues to increase, while visits to porn sites is decreasing at a steady rate. He proceeds to point out that not only has Facebook well exceeded pornography, but it has also put e-mail websites and even instant messenger use down. Users of all ages are logging onto Facebook. In fact, just the other day one of our classmates pointed out that her mom had just added her on Facebook! I’m sure she isn’t the only one who has had someone outside of our so called “Y Gen” (young generation) contact them via Facebook, I know I have!
This article was extremely enlightening for me and also kind of amusing! When I think of the internet and addiction, the first thing that comes to mind is undoubtedly pornography addiction because that’s what we’ve always heard of. Perhaps I need to modernize my way of thinking because clearly pornography isn’t the only serious addiction that has actually been empirically proven. In light of all this, it makes me believe that if Facebook related sites truly are the #1 visited sites in the age group we will be surveying, we are extremely likely to find significant results confirming that we at Westminster College have an epidemic of Facebookography addiction among us!
(http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1678586,00.html)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
This article is so interesting. I never would have thought that Facebook could ever become more popular than pornographic websites. It seems we are always hearing about how many people use porn sites and become addicted to visiting them. By seeing the large increase in popularity to users of Facebook has to relate to some form of addiction to the site. I think that this is clear in the raise in different generation users.
That is very interesting study you came across. I am relatively surprised that social networking sites exceed search engines as well as pornography. I think Facebook's popularity is only going to increase from this point forward, while becoming more advanced. According to the various in class presentations Facebook is our generation's addiction. However it will be interesting to see what the next internet addiction will be in the future.
It suprises me that Facebook is more popular than pornographic sites. There are a lot of sick people out there. But if you think about it, just about everybody out there has a Facebook account or a MySpace account, so the numbers should be pretty high. Now that we are actually talking about the users of Facebook and how they can become addicted to Facebook, it really makes sense that this site is one of the biggest sites on the web to date. Nice article, very facinating.
Post a Comment