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Facebook: Watching the Watchers by Patrick White

The influence of Facebook has grown tremendously over the years affecting the lives of both young people and adults. Its inception lies in Harvard University where programmer Mark Zuckerberg designed it as a profile site for university students. Its use started spreading to other schools including colleges and high schools before becoming popular to the entire world. Today, one cannot neglect the benefits as well as harms that this social networking site presents to people far and wide. Facebook helps in fostering and maintaining relationships while at the same time exposing private information about users to strangers. Patrick White’s watching the Watchers article attests to both aspects of Facebook in a lucid manner.

The social platform, Facebook, transformed “oh nothing” responses that Ms. Van der Spank would often get from her children to healthy relationships, and the same effects could multiply to any parent. Ms. Bromberg serves as another example that illuminates the benefits of the social site to family relationships. However, Facebook also made Ms. Van’s private information public, and it only took a short while before she began complaining about how people spy on her through Facebook. This article also suggests that Facebook is taking away the need to socialize in person. True to these sentiments, young people today exhibit profound changes in the way they make friends and ask for dates. While the article praises the social networking site for its ability to manage and maintain relationships, it also presents the bad side of Facebook. In a nutshell, watching the Watchers by Patrick White opens up Facebook users, young and old, to both sides of Facebook enabling them to devise ways and set limits to ensure a balance between the positive and negative aspects.