Facebook : Pros vs Cons

            In today society nothing can spread your life moments faster than social media, we use one form of social media everyday to see what are friends and family are up to. There are many different websites and app to link daily moments and memories to the world, so one of the most popular social media out there is Facebook. Facebook has over 1.23 billion users and 757 million daily users, Facebook is a great way to connect with friends, family and local events going on in and around your community.  Businesses use Facebook to promote their services, entertainers and music groups setup fan pages, organizations setup up pages for you to follow to keep up to date what events and projects that they'er putting on. Our society has really become obsess with Facebook, we tend to post everything we do on Facebook, from what we eat, buy, stay, visit, or even whom we are dating or married too.  There are lot's of positives to using Facebook when it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family that lives hundreds to thousands of miles away or just down the street, it's a great way to help promote a startup business or get your brand out there onto the the net for everyone to see.  But there is also a dark side to Facebook, Facebook has become an outlet for privacy issues. I know Facebook has privacy settings that are there to protect us but do they really work? As a parent you really need to watch whom your children are befriending and talking to on Facebook, even as adults we need to be careful who we add and talk to on Facebook. Facebook has become a breeding ground for stalkers, pedophiles, sex offenders and other shady people. We are starting to see people posting videos of kids beating other kids with adults fueling the beating, gang members showing off weapons and drugs, women & men being degraded, porn, shaming photos/videos, fake profiles, hate pages and bullying.  Facebook can bring many positives and negatives in to your social media world, for some it brings drama, negative attention, stress and pain, for others it helps them grow and meet new people while keeping up to date on all the things that they follow and find entertaining. We all need to be careful on what we post, who we talk about, who we follow and where we tag ourselves. All these things can bring us a world of drama with friends, family and even the law. The important thing to remember is that we don't need to add everyone who sends us a friends request or post every single detail of our lives out for the world to see, sometimes it good to have a little mystery to our lives.

             So as I write this blog today I'm three weeks removed from Facebook, i deactivated my account as a way to get away from the social media norm and try to connect with friends and family on another level. I'm a child of the 80's before social media, cell phones and the internet was a major part of our lives. I hear people all the time say "Oh I can not live without Facebook" and the funny thing is it's very true, some people can not go 15 mins with out checking their devices to see what's happening on Facebook. Some people even go as far as putting their jobs at risk by surfing Facebook at work, sure it's entertaining but is it really worth putting your job at risk? I mite or mite not go back to Facebook who really knows, right now I'm building my Twitter, Twitch and Instagram following  for my side project I'm working on. Do i miss Facebook? Truth is I really don't miss Facebook, I seem to be more productive and happier off of Facebook and really cut ties with the negative drama I always seem to have found myself in on Facebook. Maybe one day in the future as my brand grows I'll return to Facebook to open a business page, as for now posting a picture on instagram or a short tweet is all my friends and family really need to see or know about what's going on in my life.