Essay

In an age where information and interactions are just a few clicks away, it has become easy to blame social media sites for problems in society. There are some who oppose this idea and others who are on board with the notion. Social media can have both a positive and negative effect on today’s society; it is up to the individual to decide the effect on them. In order to better understand what a social networking site is let us quickly review their history. In 1997 the first social networking site SixDegrees.com was founded (Procon, 2013). It is considered to be the first social networking site because it provided the opportunity to do basic functions such as connecting to friends and creating a personal space. Other sites quickly followed and advanced more rapidly then SixDegrees. These sites included: MySpace, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, and Friendster. Founded in 2002 Friendster is considered the site that popularized social networking in the United States (ProCon, 2013). Today it is estimated that Facebook has an average of one billion users a month (Smith, Segall, and Cowley, 2012). Twitter is the second largest site with an estimated 500 million users worldwide (Metro, 2012). Pinterest a site founded in 2009 ranks as the third largest site with an estimated 23 million users (Ngak, 2012). Although social media sites are a fairly new technology many people have taken advantage of the positive effects that they offer. One of the major positives of this technology medium is the rate at which information can be shared. In several instances information and eyewitness accounts have been available on sites such as twitter long before local or national media coverage was available. For example people involved in the shootings in Aurora, CO reported the happenings on Twitter and YouTube (Sutter, 2012). It is estimated