LIANE ABBEY
Columnist
Experiencing paranoia, procrastination, and pandemonium?
You must be on Facebook.
Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter have skyrocketed in the last decade, turning fully functioning students into “vegetables.”
Countless times I’ve been working on a report and have turned to Facebook as a tool of diversion to avoid the task at hand.
Instead of being productive in any way, I’ve sat at my desk with one hand on the mouse, continuously clicking through photos, or liking statuses while my other hand supports my drooling face.
Lately, I’ve been asking myself why the Facebook epidemic has affected us all. The only answer I come up with is that we let it be shoved down our throats, disguised as a pretentious way to promote ourselves the way we want to be seen instead of who we are.
You’d be lying if you said you didn’t get some kind of satisfaction when friends like a photo you’ve posted of yourself.
Even if that photo has been edited to look nothing like you. It’s not a bad thing to want to be liked, but it’s strange and sickening that we strive for social acceptance and flaunt vanity on the Internet.
Whether you believe it or not, most of us have an online persona with qualities we don’t display unless we are in front of a monitor.
Catfishing is a perfect example of this.
We take for granted the quality of human interaction of which we are capable.
If you only know your friend’s birthday because it pops up in the right hand corner of your screen, maybe you should consider how well you really know that person.
And, chances are that if you have 1,000 friends on Facebook, you don’t know everyone’s birthday.
This once small website, meant for interaction between students at one college, has now become ritualistic in our day-to-day lives.
Really consider the amount of time you’ve spent updating your Facebook profile.
Now consider the amount of time everyone in the world combined has spent on these social networking sites.
Surely we could have done something truly groundbreaking.
Break the habitual cycle by LOGGING OUT!