How much Facebook is too much?

The TV is off and my music is paused, but one thing still remains open -- Facebook. I'll admit that I am somewhat of a Facebook junkie; for most of the day it occupies a browser tab in Chrome, so that whenever I feel in need of a break from studying, I can easily flip down the list of status updates and see what all of my friends are up to. Most of you reading this would agree to have a habit similar to mine, where you spend at least a few minutes every hour scrolling through social networking sites. What slips our minds, however, is the amount of time we devote to the task. Say you take five minutes, six times a day to skim through the News Feed -- roughly 30 minutes a day. That doesn't seem like a lot of time, does is it? Well if we do a quick calculation, that's 182 hours a year spent looking at others' profiles, usually only to find that the pizza they had last night for dinner was really good (seriously, is that the best status people can come up with?). Shockingly, I have a similar amount of time built around my Facebook usage. Today, for example, I used the social site to chat with my chemistry lab partner and to look through some pictures, in addition to checking up on some of my high school friends. That totals roughly forty-five minutes in itself. Sadly, those forty-five minutes could have been used to study for some upcoming tests.

So, if we spend so much time on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, why haven't we developed something more interactive, like Gibson's "consensual hallucination?" Well, while we do have things comparable to Gibson's matrix --Second Life and the Sims -- progress towards a point where operators will be able to "jack in" has remained quite slow. The reason may be attributed to our negative attitude toward giving up our human senses for artificial stimuli sent to us through nodes on our heads. As discussed in class, once we integrate with computers, many fear we will no longer be "human."

Taken from the public domain. Photo by: ExplainThatStuff

It is possible that such a virtual reality will become possible. And once it does, social networking sites may be obsolete, alongside face-to-face conversations, which even today are being pushed down by internet chatting and telephone conversations. Furthermore, the time users spend inside the alternate reality will surely dwarf the usage of Facebook today, meaning that two or three generations from now, the people on Earth will more than likely have little to any social skills, and a problem dealing with reality. So, if this matrix is created, how will society deal with human and computer integration, and will the matrix become the new Facebook?

Work Cited:

• Explainthatstuff. Ethernet Networking Cable. Digital image. Flickr. Yahoo Inc., 14 July 2008. Web. 8 Feb. 2011. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/explainthatstuff/3752750492/>.