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The darker side of Facebook

 

Every day I find myself staring at Facebook’s blue-and-white home page. I don’t think I’m the only one who logs on in an obsessive rush to check for new notifications, messages and comments.

It seems as though Facebook users are fueled by receiving attention and focusing on themselves. Rarely do I see status updates that aren’t about the user.

I can understand frequent status updates if someone is excited about a particular event that’s happening. Graduation, holidays and meeting with friends and family are a few important aspects of many peoples’ lives. Studying for midterms, being bored in class or deciding on which movie to rent is not enough to warrant a status change, especially if it is updated every few minutes. 

According to Facebook’s statistics page, there are currently more than 300 million active users and at least half of that number “log in to Facebook on any given day.”

According to an article by The Telegraph, a newspaper in the United Kingdom, Facebook can be beneficial for users. Like certain video games and playing Sudoku, keeping up on Facebook stimulates the “working memory” area of the brain, which involves remembering information and using it.

‘”‘You’re keeping track of past actions and mapping the actions you’re going to take,'” said Dr. Tracy Alloway from the article.

Should Facebook be the main object of stimulation? Shouldn’t we be using our working memory outside of cyberspace? “Farmville” and “Bejeweled” can only do so much to help power the brain.

It seems as though social networking is no longer a social activity. The technology we receive that is upgraded and modified at lightning speed has changed the meaning of socialization for many high school and college students. 

BlackBerrys, iPhones and other qwerty-keypad cell phones allow users to download Facebook applications, which can further encourage college students to make social networking their main focus. The applications allow these sites to stay on top of the market while at the same time encouraging people to spend more of their free time getting lost in updating their profile and chatting with friends.

Twitter further proves the idea that young adults can receive a quick-and-dirty bit of information before moving on to the next. Tweeting from mobile devices reinforces the idea that updating has been made more convenient and should be done on a more frequent basis.

According to Facebook’s statistics page, there are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile product,.

The page also states that more than 65 million active users access Facebook through their mobile devices. These people are almost twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

Maybe it’s Facebook’s fault that my generation is so apathetic. Perhaps we’re so busy chatting online or gabbing in our status updates about what’s driving us insane that we feel no need to do it outside of cyberspace.

According to a 2006 Time magazine article, Facebook users were unhappy with a new feature that was released on the Web site. What did they do?

“Within 24 hours, hundreds of thousands of students nationwide organized themselves to protest the new feature. Ironically, they’re using Facebook to do it.”

What need do we have to talk about our passions in person when a 150-character status update can do it faster and to a larger audience? No need to stretch your vocal chords anymore, all the talking can be done at the touch of a fingertip.

Perhaps this lack of socialization has less to do with technology that pulls us away from interpersonal communication and has more to do with a lack of confidence. Perhaps people are forgetting what it means to socialize face-to-face with actual human beings. Facebook makes this convenient with the floating footer with a built-in instant messaging system. How thoughtful. Now I never need to use an external instant messaging system and can spend all day on Facebook if I ever needed to.

Instead of calling someone, I’ve seen friends who will now wish others a happy birthday through Facebook just after midnight. I didn’t realize how life-consuming this Web site was until I noticed people making plans online instead of text messaging or calling each other.

Perhaps parents should be the one to blame for their children spending too much time on the Internet. They should have been the ones teaching their kids from a young age about self discipline and the right amount of time to spend on leisurely activities. Then again, if it’s not the Internet, there’s another brand new work of technology that’s got us hooked.

A recent Associated Press news article stated that a Canadian woman lost her benefits from work because of images her insurance agent found on her Facebook account. The company said that they “would not deny or terminate a claim solely based on information published on Web sites such as Facebook.”

A few weeks ago a friend made a Google search on her name. I asked why, and she said that companies now search potential employee’s names to see what the results bring.

This scares me. How does my personal, private life influence my academic and professional life? It scares me that one or two possibly off-color images taken out of context could make or break my career as a journalist.

What if the search results produce information on someone with the same name as mine? How would my potential employers know what’s truly my work and what isn’t? How would they know that the MySpace picture depicting a group of college students partying too hard isn’t related to me at all?

My journey through college at SJSU has made me realize that here in Silicon Valley, we are dependent on technology. I can’t take five steps without seeing someone text messaging or calling on their cell phones, sitting alone with their laptop running, or passing people who are hooked up to their MP3 players.

It’s about time we all shut down our computers and cell phones and smell the air that’s not corrupted by cyberspace.

Kaajal Morar

-Editor in Chief