Facebook...a mindless waste of time? I THINK NOT!

According to an article by Joe Crawford Facebook and other social networking sites may not be as much of a waste of time as people assume. You always hear oh, you are wasting your time on the internet, the internet is killing your brian cells, you are making yourself dumb by watching those youtube videos. But what about when you are talking on the phone, or when you are emailing a friend those are just as time wasting as facebook is but they do the exact same things, they allow you to connect with people and communicate with them at a more personal level and they help you stay in touch with people.

A team or researchers conducted a study of over 800 individuals and watched them as they interacted on social networking sites such as facebook and myspace. They found that teenagers not only interact with one another on these sites, they also express themselves creatively, flirt, develop relationships, and learn basic technical skills all at the same time. In face this type of stuff isn't rotting their brains at all it is actually necessary for normal brain development. Of course there are some down sides to internet use like child soliciting online, privacy factors, etc etc but from the evidence the benefits far outweigh the costs. So the next time your mom or dad or whatever gets on your case about wasting away online just make sure to tell them hey!!! I need this for normal brian development, get off my back ;P

"It may look like kids are wasting a lot of time online, but they're actually
learning a lot of social, technical and also media literacy skills," said Mizuko
Ito, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine who led the study."

~Mildred