The internet has famously transformed the way that we live our lives and above all how we communicate with each other. In just a few short years, enterprises like Facebook have grown from being a niche idea to becoming one of the major internet powers on the planet.
So meteoric has been the rise that, just last week Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, a multi-billionaire and the subject in an Oscar nominated film (at just age of 27) even had the honour of dinner with the President of the United States. Social networking is massive business.
It is also becoming the subject of academic investigation. A high profile research project in 2010 studied the way that people represent themselves through their Facebook profile images, and an altogether different project has just revealed the stress that comes with social networking.
According to professors from Edinburgh Napier University one of the principle causes of stress surrounding social networking is to do with friend requests. Over one in ten respondents said they felt anxious when responding to friend requests with over 30% participants saying they felt guilty about turning down friend requests.
A different facet of the research discovered that Facebook members also experience anxiety about removing themselves from the social network just in case they are left out of some important information or social event, despite the fact they don't particularly enjoy using the social networking site.
Of course, a factor that the report didn't appear to consider was the size of people's guilt or other stress-related responses, after all, it does not seem likely that these experiences had a sizeable impact on their day to day living.
At the end of the day, social networking is a social phenomenon and there's no question that Facebook will be with us for years to come. Social networking has become part of how we live, and a whole eco-system has grown around it.
Finally, if you are yet to become one of the alleged 0.6 billion members of the giant social networking site, all you require is a good broadband connection from companies like Sky and an email address, and the rest is easy.
James Harrington is a freelance writer with a particular interest in the interface between technology and society. He recommends Sky for home broadband.