As we have progressed into an age where social networking has become "the" activity, I have found that Facebook is an addictive thing. My dependence on the very company which has grown exponentially since its development in 2004 has become lesser and lesser because of this observation. My current use of Facebook is as an outlet to find comedic statuses and/or pictures. In the past five years, I've watched as Facebook morphed from the small development among teenagers to a large scale monopoly (almost) that has hooked families worldwide.
The first time I watched The Social Network, in which the ins and outs of Facebook's production are publicized, I was surprised at the fact that Mark Zuckerburg knew exactly how people would respond to his "bigger idea" which would get him into his special club. He knew how a person would want to keep up with his friends' pictures and statuses. Or how a mother would want to make sure that her child, who is miles away at college, is all well and good without having to annoy him with a long email containing questions he may not want to answer (like: what he has been up to or what kind of friends he has been making [both could be answered by recently uploaded pictures on Facebook]).
Now onto the observations I made of my family:
The first in my family to join Facebook was my older brother, who is four years my senior. he was in high school at the time and heard about it through friends. Facebook, then, wasn't open to people of all ages. In fact, it was almost a coming-of-age thing. You had to be a part of a schooling or business network to be accepted. Honestly, I lied about being a part of my brother's high school network to get into Facebook. And finally, once I had snuck into the system with a fake birthdate and being a part of a network I eventually would have become a member, it seemed that the age barrier disintegrated. And everybody could be a part of something bigger than themselves (something that could help them connect with friends from high school or that exotic trip they took fifteen years ago). And one by one throughout the next three or four years, my entire family had a Facebook.
Presently, there is a quarrel every day about who gets how much time on the sole computer of the family to do what has become "the" activity. In retrospect, I would have liked to have refrained from getting a Facebook. I hardly get on the thing anymore because I have found it (as previously stated) to be somewhat like an addiction. My mother is on Facebook Mobile for hours at a time in her room upstairs (My brother once sarcastically said, "Mom's room is like a Facebook cave.") It's sad to think that people have actually become more and more detached from people by sitting at their home desktop scanning what has reached "Top News" or stalking their friends from the mandatory activity of school/work. Are we becoming more anti-social because of the current "the" activity?
And what is worse is that businesses now depend on Facebook for advertising. Whether you own a gaming business or a dating service, the first place you are going to go for advertising is Facebook. Even now as I write this post, I see in the bottom right hand corner of my blog an advertisement that combines Microsoft Outlook with Facebook. Could Facebook be the real world now? Is it like that cliche virtual gaming system that will never let the gamer out of its world?
Mark Zuckerburg, you are a smart man by catering to the wants of...everybody, but I know what the end product of Facebook. It is a living hell when people addictively use Facebook. And although we are living in an economic downturn, Facebook could take us to a behavioral downturn inside of all families, and we don't need that.
