Friday 30 April 2010

Caved

So I caved. And after twenty days of being without Facebook I reactivated my account. This was not done because I missed it, because quite honestly I didn't. It was nice to live without the pressures of a cyber reality, to be contacted by my real friends through other methods, to see people rather than to talk to them for hours over one word wall comments that in reality meant nothing. In the last twenty days I have seen my friends more, had actual conversations, and felt a little lost.

It is amazing the amount of comfort that can come from an online existence, no matter how shallow or superficial it may be. To sit in a room at home with nothing to do can sometimes be a pleasure, other times it becomes a curse.

Part of my decision to leave Facebook is due to the distraction it created for me regarding my work. This distraction has not left me when Facebook did, instead I have found other ways to procrastinate from my work. Granted it has been more productive at times, such as physically seeing my friends, writing songs and learning the guitar, but it has still been there.

I still disagree with a lot of what Facebook represents, a society in which we can no longer communicate in through god given sources, a place where things are no longer 'official' until stated on Facebook and a tool by which we are able to create a false sense of self available to anyone to see, judge and comment via the simple aid of a 'like' button or a comment box.

We are slowly becoming a world where friendships will be unable to form and grow unless a computer screen is appropriately placed in front of ones eyes or a mobile with Internet access is held in ones hand. It is a world where major companies are beginning to rely on the fan pages of a social networking site and where a profile page literally has power over the user.

I can see us as a society, as a race, being sucked into an artificial world and as much as I am against it I am a part of it.

In the twenty minutes that I have been back on Facebook I have had 'best friends' talk to me more than in the entire 20 days I have been absent from it. I have been contacted about upcoming shows and have been welcomed back as though I were a family member who had not been home for a long time. This is the world we live in now and I am afraid to say that I am a part of it.

Surely it is better to be surrounded by cyber friends in an electronic world than to be all alone in a living breathing one?

Facebook is comfort. It is the place I go to and speak to friends when I am home alone and with no where to go for whatever reason. It is the site I visit to pass my time and to put off doing work and it is apparently the place where all my 'best friends' reside.

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