… you love it or you hate it.
I deactivated my Facebook account for three whole days. That’s right, from the 21st of January until the 24th January, I pressed the deactivate button, making myself scarce around the website. Why would I do, what some of my friends would have called it, virtual suicide?
I was as close to an addict as one could possibly be. I’d sit down at my desk, flicking through my pharmacology textbook. After about five minutes, I’d think, what’s going on on Facebook? So I’d open my laptop, open Safari and navigate to the Facebook website. And then I’d see a plethora of notifications, app requests, photo tags, the list goes on and on. So I realised, it had to go if I had any hope of passing these formative exams that were coming up.
Maybe I’m just being a technophobe and I should be embracing the development of the internet, but sometimes you can’t help but wonder whether technology can go too far — whether Facebook (and other social networking sites for that matter) permit new social norms that wouldn’t exist in real life. However, anyone who knows me in real life would know I’m anything but a technophobe, sporting a Blackberry and relying on constant communication.
Facebook has created another world that rungs alongside real life. Gone are the days where communication was a private thing between two or more people — the advent of “wall-to-wall” enables your conversations to be broadcast to all your friends (and other stalkers depending on your privacy settings!). It’s like having conversations to each other using megaphones. Others can then look into your conversations. And now that the Facebook layout has changed, you get bombarded with people’s wall-to-wall conversations just by logging on!!
We’re now at a stage where people’s social lives revolve around Facebook. Events get advertised on Facebook. People create a profile for themselves which they present themselves to the world with — the new “first impression” (c.f. the traditional first impression from meeting someone in person). They then get tagged in various photos in all sorts of compromising situations (c.f. the embarassing rumours that get spread from person to person). Facebook is like an online virtual society that runs parallel to real life. It’s not healthy.
So why haven’t I left, I hear you cry? Because at the moment we’re in too deep. To be out of Facebook at university is like locking yourself in your room at halls. You miss out on planned events. You miss out on a vast channel of communication that you can exploit if you’re not personal enough to exhange phone numbers!
So I think I’ve found a solution that seems to work. I haven’t logged on to Facebook on the computer for a while yet I’ve still been in touch. Facebook on my Blackberry strips down Facbeook to the bare essentials — wall posts and messaging. It reduces Facebook down to a tool for communication, alongside E-mail and texting, stripping out the riff raff that comes with it — a gossip pool known as the “home page”, countless sheep-throwing requests, and the like.
Granted it’s not the most ideal solution and I do long for the day the Facebook craze passes, because frankly, while it was good in the beginning, I’m just getting sick and tired of it.
