Mass Media

I've developed a bad habit. I'm finding that Facebook has slowly overtaken the other forms of communication that I once used. For example: In 2005, a year after I had graduated from college, I had a friend send me an email suggesting I join Facebook. I had always been reluctant to join any chat site or anything because I remembered spending hours chatting with friends on Instant Messanger. The conversations had been somewhat meaningless and eventually I got fed up with it and quit using it when I went to college. I felt like I was wasting away my time. So when I got this email, even though I had known about MySpace before, I was intrigued because my friend said it was more filtered than MySpace and was just a way to see what friends were up to. So I joined.

Initially, it was really fun to see who was on Facebook. I would search people all the time and add them as friends. Rebs and I started comparing how many friends each other had, kind of a competition to see who had the most. It was fun to catch up with old friends that I hadn't talked to in a while. And then there were these fun applications you could dowload and make a cartoon family, giving names of your real family members that you didn't like to the dog and cat. Or you could see how "likable" you were by taking a quiz. And there were groups you could join or become a fan of a band or a person. Eventually, somewhere between updating my status and finding out which "80's heartthrob you are", I realized how ridiculous it was all becoming.

Since then, I've also noticed that my friends, though I have many, don't really write on my wall much to say hi. Instead, they just update their status to let everyone else know what they're doing. On top of this, twitter was created, so now you can update your status and see other people's statuses (statii?) every minute of the day. It's all too much for me. I miss calling people up to chat with them about life. If I have something important to say that is immediate, then I can email. And yes, it's fun to see my friends' picture albums, but I remember as a kid, looking through real life photo albums together, laughing at the memory of a good time.

I know some of this is my fault because we do have the option still to send emails and print photos and call friends on the phone. But this technology, that which is supposed to make life more fruitful and prosperous and easier, is encouraging me to exchange depth for quantity. It pushes me in the direction of getting on Facebook 5 times a day just to check and see what other people are saying about their lives, but never interacting with them myself. Basically to become a voyeur. Our culture or society, or whatever you want to call it, encourages this. Even this blog is for the world to see but to say nothing. (Yes, I know there's a spot for people to comment, but how many people actually do that?) It's just so easy to hide behind the computer. To feel like you have so many friends when you actually know none of them.

I've actually deleted a few friends from Facebook. I did it one day when I was passing through my friends list and was having trouble remembering how I knew this and that person. I looked at a couple of their pictures to make sure I could remember, and then after some thought, I deleted them. It's not that I don't want to be friends with those people, it's just that they are so far removed from my life that it would take twice the effort to include them. i've decided that a hand-full good friends is worth more than two hundred acquaintances. That doesn't mean that I'm going to delete everyone from my Facebook (I'd be more tempted to just shut my page down). But there is a lot to be said for the effort it takes for a person to handwrite and mail a letter. It shows that the author cares enough to take the time to do it, rather than it just being a convenience.