Why do we even bother?

Why do people get these accounts on social networking sites? I mean, we see our friends and family everyday for the most part but why do we have these accounts? Why would we want to distance ourselves even more from our loved one by adding a middle man, such as a Facebook or twitter. Yes you can connect with friends whom you don’t normally see but why is this “solution” for communication causing such a distance?  

I can start with a testimony; I know I got my Facebook account because it was “exclusive” at the time. You had to be invited to get an account and granted I saw my High school pals every single day and for 7 hours a day but just in case I didn’t catch one of them that day I could easily go write on their Facebook wall. Beyond MySpace, Facebook , though it was highly unnecessary at the time It was prepping me for a bigger world of social media sites….Sites such as twitter, LinkedIn, foursquare.

The more of those sites I gain membership into the more “friends” I got and the more people I could remain in contact with. According to Coyle & Vaughn, “A recent study found that college students use Facebook , a popular social networking site, to maintain their social capital. They use Facebook to stay linked with people with whom they used to be more closely involved, e.g., former classmates”. They are saying that college students are in fact using their Facebook accounts to stay in contact with friends and “friends”.  Coyle and Vaughn, also add in “A related study investigated whether college students use Facebook for “social searching” or “social browsing”. Social searching occurs when a Facebook user looks up particular individuals he or she already knows or has become aware of via an offline connection in order to learn more about them. Social browsing, on the other hand, occurs when users try to find strangers online whom they would like to meet offline. Overwhelmingly, college students are using Facebook for social searching. Also known as Facebook stalking, Social browsing adds a completely different element to people knowing a lot about you but they fail to acknowledge it when in the presence of them in real life due to the fact of not actually  knowing them and also not wanting to be deemed weird or creepy.