You know the drill, check your e-mails, send a tweet, update your facebook status, write your blog and log onto all the other social networking sites that you use. It’s all about staying in touch and feeling connected.
But, as Facebook launchest its new hub called Peace on Facebook, that hopes to provide a space for dialogue and conflict resolution, and, ultimately, end all human conflict, it is time to ask is all this social netwoking really helping to bring the world together?
According to the site, the feature aims to enable “people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas,” thus mitigating “world conflict in the short and long term.” But can this really work?
At their best social networking sites help us stay in touch with people in an age which is becoming more geographically fragmented. And they can better equip us to deal with a more diverse society and expose us to a wider range of opinions.
Political activites have been organised through social networking sites and jobs have been founds through sites such as LinkedIn.
But, all this social networking means hours staring at a computer and missing out on face to face contact. And it’s been claimed that social networking can ‘devalue’ the meaning of friendship.
We have also heard the reports of suicides linked to malicious gossip circulated on a social network.
This celebrity withdrew from public life claiming that she would lay in her bed all day on the computer on Twitter.
So is social networking helping to bring us together? Are we mising out on important human contact?
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BBC World Have Your Say 
Good morning Helen:
So is social networking helping to bring us together?
~I think it is a mixed blessing~
Are we mising out on important human contact? ~Yes~
=Dennis Junior=
<But can this really work?<
What are we going to be without, if we don't try our best…to give
it a chance….
=Dennis Junior=
No question that social networking on the Internet is bringing people together and it is wonderful to be able to read and hear the views from so many different places and from so many different people of different backgrounds. However I do not believe that it is having any effect at all on the overall direction of things worldwide. When it starts affecting votes and how people vote then we might see some results, politics is about power, political power is about votes in our capitalist democracies.
Until and unless the misuse or abuse of the social net-working is not controlled or stopped, it will prove to be more of a nuisance than of any merit.
“Is social networking the best or worst chance at bringing the world together?”
In my opinion, it’s neither. It’s A chance to bring certain people together (not the “world” though, as only a minority of the world’s population have access to internet or different social networks) — but it would be just naïve to count on it as a strategy to help to solve or ultimately end world conflicts.
Social networking sites cannot be blamed for creating nusiance which indirectly affets a person’s life. The role of soial neworking sites is to bring people of diffrent thoughts together in a virtual world which has nothing to do with a person real life, You cant trust a person which you havnt seen from your own eyes, Although i do beileve its an exchange of cultures, but it has failed in bringing people closer, The important human contact can not be voided. Instead of this it had created serious hea;th mental and social problems in the lives of teens and children who think Virtual world is all they need to loose free from this world. My own sister was adddiced or obbssed with this socialnetworking mania, She never spared her time for social gatherings. Social Networking sites by far is playion onle a fraction of the role when it comes to bringing people close together. Other wise “Excess of everything is bad” and that is also true in the case of social networking sites.
I’m not sure if social networking will bring people together. I can say from personal experience just on this blog I have a better understanding of people that are different from me, and my mind has been changed a couple of times on very important issues. It also has had the effect of making me think more before I speak (write). If this were to happen on a grander scale, maybe it would have a huge impact. Or maybe not. It’s really different communicating in the cyberworld than it is face to face.
It absolutely does help bring people together. I signed up for Facebook earlier this year, and I was able to reconnect with high school friends who I hadn’t seen in ten or more years.
It also helps people pull together for a common cause. There’s a Facebook group dedicated to finding that Virginia Tech student that went missing at the Metallica concert a couple weeks ago; this group now has over 20k members, and leads have been generated based on information and videos posted to that group.
How is telling people what you are doing at this very moment or what you’re eating for dinner going to aid in world peace?
if anything, this will just make people more narcissistic.
@ steve
That’s only one aspect of it. I have started talking to people all around the world because of things like this, and it has opened up my thinking and made me LESS ego centric.
-Anthony, LA, CA
I think that I will second Patti on this one. My attitudes have also been softened,or hardened,on some topics. Although basically I am still me. And yes,social networking does make a difference. At what other period in time,could I;personally;have known what some person in Iraq,India,afghanistan or many other regions on this globe was thinking,or doing,and almost in an instant. I, from this island race,who mostly thought that we were the only people in the world with anything to say. That has now all changed for the better;thanks to technology.
Social networking has always been valuable. It’s as old as the spoken language. Now as for the use of digital communications as it pertains to social networking, it is still sorting its self out. In some form, it will be as important as it always has been.
The danger from psychopaths on the net is no harder and no easier to detect than is danger from such people when you are eyeball to eyeball with them. Psychopaths are expert at acting normal. If there is danger, it is from the higher number of personalities you may encounter on the net, thus increasing the odds of encountering more psychopaths.
Social networking broadens our views as we are in touch with ideas and impressions that we never thought of from different cultures, and regions. With time it will definitely befriend people accessing and reading each other.
Social networking , as of now is at best a pastime where people like to show off.Nothing called social about it.Yes,friendships are built by face to face contact, not other wise;possible only in films and literature.It is not a fact.
These attempts only help some people who host the site to make money.
May be I’m destined to be a square peg, but I have almost never found any one with my opinion in the real world. At least on the net I can often find birds of my feather even if they are half way across the globe. I am not necessarily looking for friends but to convince my self that I am not the only crazy one.
It’s too soon to tell. I think that the anthropologists of the future will either consider what we do today as being as significant as the development of written language or as something more akin to arguing about what to have for dinner on the Titanic.
Social network is for people for foolish publicity hungry people to expose them to all liknds of unwanted interference in heir daily life.
i cam across a facebook showing an old friend of mine saying he wants to communicate with me. iwas not sure if he wanted to but i realise we studied in the same school and by that connection they send few likely names of people i may be interested. i lost interest and same with tweeter.who want to say where am at a particular momnet in time? all waste of timea nd energy
There are many kinds of social networking all of them are valid. The latest are just additions.
With the advent of superior technology and new inventions, communication has improved leaps and bounds and now it has reached a stage ,where you can have access to the whole of world at a click of a mouse. With this in background , i feel social networking sites have contributed immensely in understanding and expanding your horizon of knowledge through interactions with different people with varied culture and mindset.
At the same time you surely miss the warmth of human touch of face to face contact where you read the mind by observing .
All said and done you cannot ignore or undermine social networking.