In a Facebook Minute

In a Facebook minute…oooEEEooo…your friends’ status can change.
In a Facebook minute…oooEEEooo…things can get pretty strange.

Besides being lovingly ripped off from the musical genius of Mr. Don Henley and The Eagles, these lines sum up some of my general thoughts about the pervasive nature of Facebook.

Like nearly every 16 to 30-year-old with computer access I am a mild Facebook addict. When I log on to the internet I open 3 pages in my web browser – Pandora.com, hotmail.com, and Facebook.com – to get music going, quickly check e-mails, and status updates before settling into any other task. Total average time to log-on, peruse e-mails & status updates, and move on: 4.2 minutes. Over the past two years this has become so ingrained in my routine that it has become and habit. And this happens at least six times a day.

Here’s an interesting experiment, change your status or profile to include something ridiculous and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I have gone weeks without so much as a ‘Facebook poke,’ but if my status update is catchy, alarming, or dramatic in any way my wall is flooded with comments, reassurances that my friends ‘like this,’ and the like. So while I have not heard from my friends for weeks at a time, I know that they are keeping tabs on me, or to borrow the popular term, they are Facebook stalking.

But this is what we have come to. As Americans we cram as much into our waking hours as we possibly can, often at the expense of our own mental down time. Rather than call a friend in the evening to catch-up, we’d rather cruise their blog, facebook status, or twitter and check in on them. It’s faster, quicker, and an interaction on our terms. If a friend sends out a Facebook distress call, we can answer. But if we are already busy and there is no immediate emergency we can go on about our business confident in the knowledge that we’re a good friend because we know what’s going on.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, so how do we stop it? The simplest answer is to just make time to actually reach out to people. Call your friend on the phone, arrange to meet up for dinner, or to watch a minor league baseball game, do something, don’t just think about doing something.

The irony of posting this online has not been lost on me. I enjoy Facebook, and reading my friends blogs. I understand that faced with the option of not keeping in touch or keeping in e-touch – Facebook is great. But social networking and electronic communication cannot completely replace actual real human interaction, because when it does we are all in for a rude awakening.

So, you keep writing and reading, and I’ll keep writing and reading – then maybe once in awhile we can call or meet up.

Later.