Wednesday, December 1, 2010

#facebookfast

I've been off of facebook for about seventeen hours and I'm okay...for the most part. I guess facebook is more or less of a time killer for me in a way that YouTube sometimes has trouble being. Twitter is well, twitter. All of these social networking sites are really awesome if you're a celebrity of some caliber but when you're a "normal" every day college kid (a.k.a. a peasant) they're just something to do to:
A) Kill time in between classes
B) Talk to people at home who probably would have otherwise forgotten about you
C) Waste time even when you're not in between classes.

While I recognize how much of a time suck facebook is, it's still quite entertaining. I've done what some might call a "facebook fast" at least two times before but only for about two weeks at a time. The thing that I do each time I'm on one of my "facebook fasts" is basically say as my status and in my profile somewhere that if anybody needs to contact me they can e-mail me and give me their number half hoping someone will actually want to talk to me despite my sudden inconvenience of not being on facebook. Alas, the weeks pass and not a single soul e-mails me anything.
Point? While in some cases social networking sites are wonderful for hermits and the generally socially awkward, they can also unleash the ugly trolls within people.
The definition of troll according to urbandictionary.com is "A person whose sole purpose in life is to seek out people to argue with on the internet over extremely trivial issues. Such arguments can happen on blogs, Facebook, Myspace and a host of others."
People are usually fake on the internet. They say things they wouldn't say in real life and all of the sudden befriend people who they said earlier that day that they would rather stab than talk to. Don't get me wrong, I love the internet- especially Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube, but I seriously doubt that all of the time we spend on the internet is valuable. I've looked at my tiny clock in the corner of my screen and thought "Yeah, I have enough time to get on facebook." and what seems like two minutes later I look up and realize it's been thirty! That is a problem.
I think this is the reason why I love classic movies as much as I do. You never caught Rita Hayworth checking her facebook in the middle of Gilda or Marlon Brando making a video response begging Stella to talk to him. That's because everything was much less complicated in the realm of social networking. In those days social networking liking consisted of corporate men exchanging business cards, not seeing if their business name was a trending topic on twitter.
Okay, okay, I need to get back to doing what I need to be doing, but I just thought I'd post something since I was in a blogging mood.