Is Facebook bad for you?

Dr. Larry D. Rosen, a noted psychology professor from California State University, recently sat down with ABC News for a talk titled "Poke

Me: How Social Networks Can Both Help and Harm Our Kids." He discussed the pros-and-cons of Facebook usage by teens and young adults.

On the positive side, he mentioned that the use of Facebook has allowed teens and young adults to work on "virtual empathy." "They are able to show empathy with someone else online, and, better yet, that seems to be predicting that they get better doing it in the real world, too … providing emotions and content and feelings behind the screen allows teenagers and young adults to do it with much more ease, rather than having to do it face-to-face, which is, you know, growing up as a teenager is very difficult."

However, on the negative side, Rosen identified narcissism as a major problem.

"What we found was that those kids that spent more time on Facebook tended to show more signs of narcissism … we don't know whether it's that narcissists are flocking to Facebook because it's a way to promote "me, me, me" or that the platform of Facebook, where you're encouraged to talk a lot about yourself, can make you appear to have signs of narcissism."

Richland student Rachel Legaspi, 20, says of Facebook that it "has its good and bad. I get to connect to my family and friends abroad. As for the bad, I see my sister spending more time on social networks than I used to at her age. She's 13."

So, while Facebook (and other social media outlets for that matter) may have a downside, they also have an upside. While it may seem like too much time at a computer to some, others may be interacting with family and friends far away. Still, some people may not be getting enough physical interaction with people while other are getting to know new people of different cultures.

So, you decide. Is Facebook bad for you? Go online to www.richlandchronicle.com and vote in the poll.