If I knew how many days of my life have wasted scrolling through the Facebook news feed I think I would quite simply cry. Facebook is bad enough as it is in terms of its, quite frankly, soul destroying capabilities. But when it comes to essay writing and exam revision it truly is the Satan of procrastination. It starts with the innocent scrolling of the news feed, but when that becomes too boring, the force of the refresh button inevitably takes hold of the index finger. Alternatively, Facebook stalking people you haven’t spoken to since secondary school seems like the next best option. Conclusively Facebook is addictive, time consuming and intellectually undemanding. Yet, no matter how many negative adjectives you collocate with the word, we simply cannot restrain ourselves.
Facebook is not only a demon in itself, it’s also the key to other demonic and addictive areas of the internet including the likes of YouTube, ridiculous meme pages, Facebook apps- come on we’ve all had a go at Draw my Thing- and, worst of all, Facebook users have introduced me to another utterly pointless past time. Twitter. Over the Easter holidays I have become endorsed into the wonderful world of tweeting. Hashtag just about anything and spend hours scrolling through comments on the latest UK trends and that’s you switched off for most of the afternoon. Some of the comments, even if uttered by a friend in general conversation, I couldn’t care less about, yet everybody on Twitter seems intrigued by what complete strangers have to say about ridiculous and inane issues. The list of top UK trends at this very moment in time includes #AskMarcus, #10ThingIHate and #IfIWasBlack. See what I mean? Twitter along with Facebook has become another virtual procrastination station where people talk about anything and everything, and every user probably has the same aim in life, to avoid doing anything else that is more important. Twitter users also update the world with videos and other useless websites that they have productively spent their time on, and from there, their followers suffer as they get enraptured further and further into more futile corners of the World Wide Web.
We know we do it, but there is nothing we do to help it. You can disconnect the internet, in fact you can flush the damn wire down the toilet. It won’t solve the problem. It goes without saying that the majority of people now own a smart phone which, lets face it, exacerbates the situation. Every Facebook notification, every Tweet mention, every other form of connection that the rest of the world wants to make with us bombards our mobile phones. We can’t win.
Evidently, we’re all stuck in a vicious circle of destructive social networking from which we cannot escape no matter how hard we try. Everyone is in the same boat yet we still believe that we should inform the rest of the world. Deadlines are approaching so the Facebook news feed inevitably gets filled with ‘I wish these essays would write themselves’, ‘motivation = zero’, ‘most unproductive day ever’ all with about 10+ likes and yet more comments from people feeling sorry for themselves. However, I’m not sure whether knowing that everyone is in the same boat triggers a slight sense of comfort and relief in knowing that you and I are not the only ones banging our head against a keyboard, or whether it triggers a slight notion of discomfort in knowing that basically… we’re all screwed. Either way I guess one positive is that we are all in this black hole of cyberspace together.
