The clock reads 10:00 pm, and I still have college applications piled high on my desk. Yet with my future staring me down, I was not charting my high school accomplishments, figuring out my cumulative GPA, and my unopened Microsoft Word application was looking up at me from the desktop like a neglected infant whose diaper had not been changed in weeks.
No, I was not doing my college work, the result of which could very well end up deciding the next 10 years of my life. Instead, I was enjoying the one to six hours I designate a night to my favorite pastime: Facebook.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Facebook, let me briefly sum it up for you. It’s a program that people use to determine how many real friends they have, which can be anywhere from zero to fifty, as opposed to how many online friends they have, which is always anywhere from fifty to ten thousand.
In other words, this program is the addicting spawn of Satan. No teenager of our generation can handle the type of false love that having hundreds of fake Internet friends comes with, and the result has been an addiction among teens that could put cigarettes to shame.
Do you know anyone who doesn’t have a Facebook? I know only of those who don’t have a Facebook yet. Everyone gets one, everyone loves it, period.
You can’t look me in the eye and tell me that you don’t experience a little fiesta in your head whenever you see a new friend request or a new notification or both. And if you have multiples of these, forget it, you feel like you’ve overdosed on popularity.
It’s a sick program, one that will keep you coming back with the hope that at some point someone somewhere thought of you and decided that you were worth spending their Facebook time on, making you worthy of their acknowledgment.
And yet, with all of this knowledge, I still can’t get enough of that stupid program. I mean if I’ve counted correctly I’ve stopped writing this essay exactly seven times just to go back on and see if I have any new notifications.
It is the passion that could very well have contributed most to my personal growth, yet this growth may actually have made me a worse person.
I have learned to enjoy the sweet subtlety of someone virtually contacting me more than face-to-face conversation. My “messaging wall” has become the measuring tool of my own worth as a human being, and I have actually pondered the meaning of my own existence after a few days with no “wall posts” from those who I thought were my friends. Just when I believe that my feeling of worthlessness is enough to make me give up Facebook forever, someone comments on that crazy picture of me at the toga party, and I’m hooked back in by the spell that only social networking sites and hard drugs know how to cast.
I would never want to meet the creator of this cold-blooded version of MySpace because I wouldn’t know whether to punch him in the jaw for preventing me from getting anything done on my college apps, or give him a hug for giving me the greatest thrills of my day with the brief feelings of popularity that Facebook provides me.
As I have just seen that someone has written on my wall, I feel that this is a good place to stop and conclude this article in order to get back to what’s really important in my life.
By the way, I haven’t gotten my fix of Facebook notifications today, so friend request me. And don’t judge my addiction, because I know I have a problem and that’s always the first step.
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