By Roy Akaragian
Ardsman@hotmail.com
Are you one of the tens of thousands of people who go on Facebook or Twitter every day to update statuses, take quizzes, or play with pointless SuperPoke Pets or animals, most probably on a farm? Well then, let me inform you that you are wasting countless hours of your time. Sure, I agree that Facebook is a pretty cool website -- I use it myself, but there are a lot of downsides that people should pay more attention to. Almost everyone using this website is on it for at least two hours a day without even realizing it. All that accumulated waste could have been geared toward a useful activity, like studying for an exam, or a more entertaining activity like watching the Lakers humiliate their opponents.
You’ve probably heard from the news about stalkers and child molesters using the internet as a major weapon. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Facebook practically takes all the information posted about you and puts it right into the lap of anyone willing to search for your name. Within a matter of minutes, anyone can figure out what school you attend, where you work, and where you were last Saturday night at 10 o’clock…
To make matters worse, college counselors and employers now have Facebook as well, and won’t hesitate to do a background check on you before they give out valuable scholarships or jobs to potential candidates. One inappropriate profile picture is all it takes for your dreams of the right college or line of work to vanish. Just to make everyone aware, pictures from Facebook will even appear on Google images, and you can’t even avoid this happening by putting your profile on private. If you want to see what shows up, just try and Google yourself!
Always remember that the things you do now can affect you in the long run. So try avoiding pictures of those crazy nights you had as a freshman, because once they go up, they may never get deleted. In April of 2009, researchers from Cambridge University discovered that even after pictures were deleted off of Facebook, their direct links were not broken, and they were still available on Facebook servers.
I understand the values in being able to connect with other friends and being able to chat with them, but Facebook is so cluttered with other applications and distractions that you end up wasting most of your time instead of gaining any true value from them. If you really need to talk to friends about anything important, then just text or call them. I am sure we would all benefit from speaking to people once in a while rather than just staring at a screen and letting our fingers do all the talking.
Facebook just makes everything so much more impersonal these days. Even birthdays don’t mean anything like they used to. You can have everybody on Facebook say great things to you, but it soon becomes a mass repetition of lines straight out of a Disney Movie about how all your wishes should come true. The depreciation of sentimentality is astounding! Just like Myspace that came before, Facebook and Twitter has become a competition about who seems to be more popular by getting more friends or followers. This is when you have people with five hundred friends, but they never leave their homes and have absolutely no social skills in the real world. It really is socially endangering.
If you take a second and look at the big picture here, technology can cause as much harm as it does benefit. This is why we need to limit our use and realize when we have gone too far. I do not doubt that Facebook can be useful for finding old friends or sharing a few funny statuses and pictures, but when people start getting addicted to these programs and wasting all of their time, it becomes a case in which someone must intervene. There is no such thing as a short session on these websites because once you start, you are always looking for something to post, something to comment on, or something to play.
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