Facebook: the ultimate ego boosting tool of the 21st century. Not to mention a colossal waste of time.
It’s funny since I had always refrained from using MySpace because I thought it stupid, yet hypocritically I caved in to the whole Facebook revolution. More or less recently, my interest and activity with Facebook has been on a steady decline. I used to think it was reasonable to maintain a measure of utility by keeping my account active. But not anymore. I’ve grown an almost addictive habit of checking Facebook daily, which accounts for unnecessary lost time and productivity. I finally determined the negatives were not worth dealing with for the few and dispensable positives. There’s an infinite amount of things that are better to do than go on Facebook, and I’ll tell you why.
The underlying basis of Facebook revolves around pretension and conceit. Calling it a “social network” site is not entirely transparent nor authentic. The notion of networking has been contorted and transmogrified into something lost of its original intent. All I see when I go on Facebook is a clutter of absolutely useless information. No one really cares or should care about 99% (this is entirely factual) of the stuff others post.
I realized there was a fundamental fault with Facebook after I saw a pattern of constantly hiding different people from my news feed.
Made a status update complaining about a trivial inconvenience? Shared a picture of a meal you should be consuming rather than uploading onto the internet? Checked-in to a place as proof to everyone you live an outgoing life? Added 100 more friends that you never met or vaguely even know (but promotes your e-popularity)? Get invited to an event that you will not attend or remotely care about? Expressed your enthusiasm for something that’s quite obviously far more exciting for yourself than anyone else? THE IMMENSITY OF THE FUCK I DO NOT GIVE. People are too obsessed with inflating their own image. It’s sad.
Worst of all is the regret that I shamefully participated in some of these egocentric activities. Oh, the allure and inveiglement Facebook possesses.
Instead of mindlessly checking Facebook everyday, I can hopefully divert attention to actually living life instead of reading about it. If I need to contact someone, I may do so with other means, and vice versa. If not, then I probably don’t need to talk to you in the first place.
In many ways, this is true. Like everything else, there are the ups-and-downs of everything, like this. I do admit, it is very time-consuming but it is quite a simple way of having to contacting folks through means of the internet. Like me, I have a jazz accordion band that keeps in contact with each other with events and what not. I guess because a lot of us are actually really “active” on there, therefore, depend on such a thing to keep on contact. But whatever though, it is nice to take a “breather” from Facebook because many people DO participate in this social network. But yea, what you said, I do agree on many levels and have to admit that I too am a victim of this. =P Oh well. lol (hope I even had a train of thought with this comment).
Definitely, the level of value Facebook offers will vary from person to person. I mainly wrote this post to open up thought, because without controversy, things can get stale :-)
The decision is purely yours and there is no right or wrong either way… I might reactivate my Facebook, because as you said, there are some people that you primarily contact now through there… but will be deleting all “friends” that I don’t really know or keep in contact with anymore. We’ll see how that goes, if it still sucks then I’m done with it. I must say, it has been nice not having to check it though…
haha, I feel you dude. It’s like, I’m “friends” with some folks. Big example is my “ex”. Sure, we are on good ol Facebook, but we don’t even “talk” and what not. For goodness sake, I even blocked her from my News Feed, I might as well have deleted her. =P But I feel you man. It’s probably best that I at least not spend my WHOLE day on the internet just for liking status messages and commenting on stuff. =P That’s what photo portfolios like Flickr/and blogs and phones are for calling/texting are, right? lol But there ARE those people who do NOTHING more than stay on that ALL day. I do have to admit, I’m probably pretty close to being one of those people. Maybe that’s why I haven’t blogged or even read your blog for awhile. =P
how the hell am i supposed to talk to you about grandmighty now?
On Grand Mighty! lol