Introduction
Social networking sites have acquired such a huge following in a short amount of time it is understandable that there has been both positive and negative impacts. Here I will argue that social networking sites have a negative influence on teenagers, in the workplace and society in general. This paper is a component of the Social Networking stream for the NET204 Conference as it relates primarily to social networking and the impact it has on society. It is important to gain an understanding of what social networking is and to be aware of the influence it has on society. Social networking sites allow their users to build a profile of themselves which is freely available to a select community with links to others within the community who are able to view and share information (boyd & Ellison, 2007). There are already over 400 million users accessing Facebook (Kirk, 2010), 75 million registered users on Twitter (Gaudin, 2010) and 125 million users with access to MySpace (MySpace, n.d.). In such a short period of time social networking sites have thrived in the community, impacting the lives of both adults and teenagers alike.
