How does facebook affects people in society?

It's a interesting and pertinent question. I was reading the book "The Facebook Effect" (which is by far the best resource for finding out about Facebook; it's serious journalism unlike other books about them), and I realized some important things about Facebook.

Unlike almost any social network, Facebook necessarily mixes business with personal life, forcing us to be more consistent in the identity that we portray

Quote:This means that business associates will list other business associates as "friends", and thereby have continuous access to some particularly intimate aspects of their lives (known as ambient intimacy). This increase in "transparency", or perspective, in your network of acquaintances makes it difficult to maintain different "faces" among different groups.

According to an interview I watched with Mark Zuckerberg, one of his aims is actually to make the world has greater "integrity", which I think is really interesting. It's true, you can't imagine yourself to be one person with a certain group, and another kind of person with another group. Hence we become more honest in a way.

Quote:We are integrating our identities into something unified and consistent. Do you know how much harder it would be for someone to cheat on their partner when they have a Facebook profile? Or for a political candidate to maintain a respectable but incongruent image? So really what is happening, because of the lack of separation between profiles for specific groups (which may not always exist, what with the advent of lists, greater customization of privacy settings, and so forth), is that we're gaining a lot of integrity in our social system, which means more consistency, honestly, and openness.

sources: pythoughts - how facebook makes us better people