Everything these days is done
online, from shopping to talking to a friend. The amount of face-to-face
talking has decreased dramatically since social networking became part of our
everyday lives. We are constantly on our smart phones, checking out emails,
seeing what our “friends” are up to on Facebook, seeing what out favourite
celebrity put up on Instagram last night or tweeting about last nights episode
of Master Chef. Between all of these
many social networking sights the one to have the biggest impact on modern day
society is Facebook.
By
now, the phrase "it's not official until it's on Facebook" should
just be a part of everyday life. Most of the time, this statement is in
relation to the forming of relationships as well as breakups. Even friendships
are sometimes joked about as not being "official" until the two
people are Facebook friends. Has this Web site really taken over? (Caitlin Downer, The Quad News, March 2009) Some
people can have up to 5000 friends; with much less than 1% being people they
have actually met or know personally. We seem to believe that the more friends
we have on Facebook the more popular our persona becomes. We assume that
because we have so many “friends” on Facebook that we don’t have to spend quality
time with our real friends. Mainly because that even though you haven’t seen
them for the past month, their status updates have kept us in the loop. Which
brings up my other question; is Facebook making us dumb? So much time is spent
seeing if there is anything better happening that we seem to miss what is
really going on around us. Unaware of
what we are missing in the real world, too focused on what we could be in the
virtual world, too busy staring at 4.7” screen that seems to be glued to our hands
every second of our lives.
Facebook is literally taking
over our lives. Everyone with an account is checking it whenever they have a
spare second; they are updating, liking and commenting whenever they can. After
turning off your laptop at night to go to sleep, how many of you lay down and
pick up your phone to scroll through your news feed? Could you go a week
without Facebook? Or even a day? We need
peace and quiet in our lives again, we need face-to-face connection with
friends, we need to look out the window, experience what life is giving us and
take nothing for granted. I think it’s time to switch off, read a book, go for a
swim with friends and use Facebook for what it was made for; connecting with
people.
(Caitlin Downer,
The Quad News, March 2009 http://www.quadnews.net/opinion/does-facebook-really-affect-your-life-1.1593956#.UgLQSdI_t1E)
