Thursday, June 3, 2010

Is Nessa losing Face?


Labour MEP Nessa Childers Facebook assault this week came as a huge surprise to a lot of people - not least the 100-plus people who are employed in Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin.

On Sunday, Nessa issued one of the most bizzare press releases this column has seen in a long time - calling for new laws to protect people from the dangers and addiction to sites such as Facebook.

Ms Childers, who is a psychotherapist by profession, admits to being a keen user of Facebook herself.

But she is afraid that the rest of us may be wasting our lives by logging on to the social networking site too often.

“Visiting Facebook rewards you with virtual connections and friends. These connections then expand to fill an increasingly empty internal world creating a vicious circle,” she said.

By the sounds of it, it is almost as if she were saying that Facebook was destroying the moral fiber of this country.

Facebook has created jobs in Ireland - much needed jobs at a time when they were badly needed.

And the people of Ireland would rather thank Facebook for investing in Ireland than criticise them for their ‘so-called’ addictive product.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Existing research shows that in cases of Internet Addiction the
Internet has replaced friends and family as the source of a person's emotional and social
life." - http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/sip/docs/prog_2009_2013/wp_10.pdf