Ladies – what’s the one material thing you couldn’t live without? Your favourite pair of Abercrombie slouchy jogging bottoms? YSL Touche Eclat for covering your bin liner size bags? Or maybe the Jimmy Choo’s you worked so hard for? Or is it Facebook? Be honest with yourself now ladies, how many of us can’t get through the day without logging on, status updating and checking in and I should know, I’m very guilty of every charge! The problem is its quick, it’s easy and it fills those 10 minutes at the end of your working day. It seems a life time ago we even had to go to the effort of using a lap top or computer for our daily dose, now we can down load an app and why hey Facebook is on our phone as a constant tease.
Essentially Facebook can be a great thing. The rush of excitement when you find a friend from school, the giggles as people post pictures of your happy memories on line and shared jokes on status updates. There is something strangely comforting about knowing your ‘friends’ are but an app, click and ‘like’ away at any time you would like. How many of us wake up and immediately reach for our phones to peruse the Facebook news feed like it’s the daily paper? Knowing our friends are well and happy all over the world make us smile, feel closer to them and all without having to make any effort of emailing or phoning. And in that lies the problem. Facebook makes us lazy. Why bother to call or email or heaven forbid meet up with your friends when you can check their profile from the comfort of your Chesterfield sofa whilst your face mask sets? Why bother with the effort of words to express your happiness at their success when you can merely press the ‘like’ button? It seems so sad that in these technological times of greatness we are forgetting, what is now becoming, the ancient art of conversation.
To me it seems that Facebook is a cruel mistress. Initially charming and inviting but ultimately leaving you cold, lonely and wondering how the world really works. Facebook could be renamed ‘Fakebook’. I mean, who actually 400 friends in real life? It seems to me that Facebook quickly becomes a popularity contest to see who has the most friends, the most tagged pictures and the most ‘likes’ on their status updates. I imagine Facebook as the shop windows of people’s lives, where they put the best bits on display for us all to see and hide the rest out of sight in the stock room of their existence. But who can blame them, with all that competition, who wouldn’t want to look their best to passersby. The problem occurs when people over share and on Facebook that is easy to do. How many times have you caught people out on a lie on there, or been driven to the edge of insanity with their endless updates about how rubbish life is, or how much they have drunk or how much weight they have lost? Ask any group of women of any age and 90% will be on a diet, we are all doing it, we just don’t need to know how much you have lost, how many points you have left that day or be exposed to pictures of the skinnier you in your underwear on an hourly basis!! The other seriously negative side to Facebook is its entanglement with cyber bulling. Whilst policies are in place to stop this, tragically it’s still happening. In 2009 the first criminal charge was brought against a girl for cyber bulling, a stark reminder that if we can’t type anything nice, don’t type anything at all. When I expressed my frustration at this endless stream of drivel from some people to the boy, he kindly directed me to Lamebook (www.lamebook.com). Now I’m not one to use a blog to advertise but if you get a minute, check it out!
Chatting with the girls this week we all admitted to needing to Facebook detox, just a week or two off from the constant up dates, friend requests and the draining temptation of logging on every few hours. But what keeps us coming back to Facebook? We all know that an addiction can be viewed as a continued involvement with an activity despite the negative consequences associated with it and whilst Facebook has many of those negative consequences it often has hundreds more positive ones. Friendships have been rekindled, old memories laughed at again and at our lowest times finding that people are there for you. Maybe in future we should apply the same approach to Facebook as we do with Chanel No 5, as any style savvy girl knows, less is definitely more.
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