The Facebook Free Blog

So today’s the day we’re starting our Facebook Free… project thingy.

And we’ve an assignment where we must list several things.

Take note that I’m not a Facebook person. I sit at home and play computer games and I say ‘to hell with it’ to most forms of social networking. So many of these answers are as walls of convoluted text and gobbledy-gook that nobody should ever take seriously.

With that in mind, enjoy my neurotic rambling.

Positive Impacts of Facebook.

• You’ll be more connected to people abroad… or near you! You can also keep in contact with old friends that you don’t ever talk to in real life because they live somewhere else or something.
• Popular movements can form and mobilize over the net! Public protests (peaceful, hopefully!) can begin on Facebook.

Negative Impacts of Facebook.

• People spend way too much time on it, which inevitably leads to lower grades and reduced studying time because they’re too busy playing Farmville or some other odd game on Facebook.
• Anonymity is completely nonexistent. There’s an incredibly false sense of privacy that’s garnered when using Facebook — ‘hateful’ and ‘derogatory’ comments can easily be tracked to their source, and private info can be.. divulged quite easily, especially if somebody’s profile is set to public. I’ve read and heard from various sources [citation needed] that kids have been denied job opportunities or university entrances because of some incriminating things posted on their (or somebody else’s) Facebook.
• People are always using it at school. Though this is a rather ambivalent issue, hundreds of kids using Facebook at the same time can take a massive toll on a school network bandwidth, and Pinetree’s already having that problem as we speak! Or type.
• Face-to-face communication is being left on the wayside for things like… Face(ironically)book, e-mails and texting. In this day and age we’re moving towards saying ‘screw it’ to saying ‘I just broke up with you’ in person. Instead we’re much more content to argue it out on MSN or Facebook, and post our angst-ridden results on our ‘walls.’ Somewhat amusingly as a bit of an erudite-hermit sort of person I’d be much more content to communicate electronically than in person.
• You’ll have five hundred friends. But you’ll only talk to a select few. I suppose Facebook slightly alters the definition of a ‘friend’ to simply ‘some guy that added me because I know a person that he does but I don’t talk to him.’
• It’s addictive for some. That doesn’t really need to be explained, it really just ties into the aspect of spending too much time on the computer and not enough time on more important… things.

How this ‘hiatus’ will affect me in the course of these five days.

• It won’t at all. Though I’ve had (a recently deactivated) account on Facebook full of blatant lies, I rarely used it even while it was activated. I’d get invited to some birthday party or event once in a while but I really really didn’t care. I’d also post the occasional slanderous comment and log off. I never really cared for it, and probably never will, to be honest.

…And my prediction of the outcome of the week.

• I can’t really post a specific projection of a supposed outcome. Most of the people in this class aren’t exactly social butterflies who use Facebook whenever they can — I would know, I’m a self-proclaimed social reject myself! I suppose the select few socialites in our wonderful little class may suffer through heavy withdrawal symptoms or even break completely and resort to using Facebook like they would normally. For most of us though, not much will change.

So that’s all of my word vomiting, probably longer than anybody else’s because once I start writing it’s rather hard to stop. You can go read somebody else’s vomit now, and it’ll probably taste a lot better than mine. Best of luck to everybody, especially those select few that are cool and social enough to use Facebook on a daily basis and will probably suffer in the course of this week.

Hats off to you socialites!

– Adrian.