This house believes that Facebook is not a place for friends - Rebuttal speeches

Second Proposing speech  

To IG and her followers, you can say a lot of things about facebooking: connecting the old friends, develop new friends and rediscover your friends etc. But haven't you found this is very familiar? Just like the smoking activity in almost every French school. At the moment of the pause, smokers rush out to light a cigarette, chatting to cigarette pals, exchanging information. And you can find every day, they do that regularly; they meet their smoke friends, and even get introduced to new friends who smoke. How similar! … 

by LJ

Second Opposing speech

As most of my congener, I am registered on Facebook. How did I discover it? By a friend at school, I were watching him spending hours logged on that vestigial blue website during class. He told me that it were a fantastic social media allowing you to interact with your friends and even reconnect with old friends…

by MV

Second Proposing speech

To IG and her followers, 

You can say a lot of things about facebooking: connecting the old friends, develop new friends and rediscover your friends etc. But haven't you found this is very familiar? Just like the smoking activity in almost every French school. At the moment of the pause, smokers rush out to light a cigarette, chatting to cigarette pals, exchanging information. And you can find every day, they do that regularly; they meet their smoke friends, and even get introduced to new friends who smoke. How similar!

Due all respect, I find facebook is even lousier than smoking place because at least you can talk in face, meet real people there. Social relationship, especially friendship involves more than texting and photo tagging. Without eye contact and facial expressions, how can a friend know you are genuinely sad or happy for him or her, when your friend is telling you a story? You need to be true, be reliable to your friend and facebook is obviously not a good platform for that. We can't undervalue the importance of the texture of the verbal and nonverbal communication that we have in every normal social meeting and which is being lost in this “facebook” kind of communication. 

It's really important making a difference between having fun in facebook with your friends and seeing your friends in real. It's ok if you want to find a lot of friends all over the world but it's really a problem if you substitute normal social communication outdoor with the communication with your monitor. Your time is limited as it is everyone. You can only favorite one side. 

I rarely have the chance to speak to some classmates at school not because we don’t like each other. But because he or she smokes and I do not. It is same here. Your time is limited and you invested lots of time for your online friends to get connected. How about your friends who don’t use facebook? Abandon them or force them to join Facebook? 

Smoking is addictive so is facebook. Researchers have already found the correlation of procrastination and facebook. Probably you can see that yourself too. Every day you spend a lot of time checking the site to see if someone had sent you a message or tagged you in a photo or replied your status. Yes, without noticing it, you have already spent a huge amount of time only on checking and rechecking, which has totally nothing to do with your initial purpose of friend keeping! 

Last but not least, I imagine the following oppositions can always argue that facebook is a good tool for friend because so many so many people use it so that it should have some merits. But again, have you ever heard of a culture phenomenal named sheep effect? One lead sheep falls into a hole. What does other sheep do? They all jump into that hole... 

Everyday a lot of people become smoker and a lot of people quit smoking also. Facebook, for me,is no different: Not a good place for friend, only another bad habit. 

LJ

Second Opposing speech

As most of my congener, I am registered on Facebook. How did I discover it? By a friend at school, I were watching him spending hours logged on that vestigial blue website during class. He told me that it were a fantastic social media allowing you to interact with your friends and even reconnect with old friends…

I read carefully the JBB speech, and I agree with some of his points. I agree that Facebook is time consuming, you can easily spend hours chatting with people, play games, read articles, watch videos and photos that your friends shared. You can interact with people sharing your favorite rock band; supporting your favorite soccer team and loving same French cuisine! Thus I can understand why people can easily waste their time on this, it is creating social needs.

JBB said a word about chatting; we all know that instant messaging is not the place for really serious discussions but it is a fantastic way to interact very quickly. I’m convinced that interacting with people is a very important act that is actually disappearing...Chatting is not a big deal but it is still interacting with each other!

My colleague talked a little about having hundreds of friend, for him it is not possible that all of those friends could be very good friends. I agree with that point but do you think that it is the goal of Facebook? Basically, people have 4 or 5 best friends in real life, the kind of friends you can count on. Facebook is a social media, that is to say the place where you improve your social network. The reason why you collect friends on Facebook is only a way to expand your visibility and your social proof. People will think instinctively, “this person has a very large social network, so this person is most likely to be extrovert and famous”.

To answer the JBB’s question: “Do you consider yourself close to all your “Facebook friends”?” I would answer: Of course not and it is not the goal!

I think that people must stop the paranoia. We all know that Facebook keeps all the information it gets, that is the rule, you are aware of it since the beginning. But you are free to put information/photos/videos or not ! You have no gun on your head forcing you to put any information on the website. That is to say if you put nothing, you have nothing to fear. JBB reminded us that some people had trouble at work because of what they putted on Facebook. I say that if they did not put it on the site they would have not had any problems.

To answer the JBB’s question: “Do you consider yourself close to all your “Facebook friends”?” I would answer: Of course not and it is not the goal!

I think that people must stop the paranoia. We all know that Facebook keeps all the information it gets, that is the rule, you are aware of it since the beginning. But you are free to put information/photos/videos or not ! You have no gun on your head forcing you to put any information on the website. That is to say if you put nothing, you have nothing to fear. JBB reminded us that some people had trouble at work because of what they putted on Facebook. I say that if they did not put it on the site they would have not had any problems

Then, I have not understood why JBB asked rather or not Facebook were really free. I am sure that Facebook really is. No subscribers have ever given a penny to the company. They put valuable information but we can’t call it a payment. Facebook is officially earning from advertising and nothing from users.

To finish, I would like to answer the last sentence of JBB. He encourages his opponents to forget the technological leap behind Facebook, and try to link economic, philosophical and social views. I think that Facebook is totally free for users, and earns money from companies which want to propose products to the members. The aim of Facebook is not to find strong and loyal friendships, but to improve your social influence! And there is no philosophical question behind this statement!

MV