COLUMN: Facebook broke my social life
Social networking has become the platform of our generation — sadly.
Although the number of users may suggest otherwise, social networking has hindered day-to-day, face-to-face, interpersonal communication.
I deleted my Facebook in December as an experiment to see who I’d keep in contact with over winter break while visiting my sisters in Las Vegas.
Ultimately, I didn’t talk to many friends. I talked to people I worked with more than my own roommates.
Not to say I have burned bridges and cut the ties with friends I solely kept in touch with via Facebook, but it did prove to show me exactly who my friends were.
Upon returning to Mount Pleasant, I saw my roommate at our apartment. We exchanged the “hellos” and “how are yous” before I asked her how things were going with her boyfriend. You know, the usual.
She replied, “Oh, we broke up.”
Oops. If I still had my Facebook account, I would have known.
But because of a website with more than 845 million users, a website that is the epitome of our generation, a website where it’s acceptable to have your fetus as your profile picture, I did not know my roommate and her boyfriend broke up.
The point of social networking websites is to connect people through multiple channels — updates, photos, links, branding and promotion — but in the very act of doing such connecting, it has hindered the ultimate skill people should have — verbal communication.
As a journalist, social networking and the Internet are permanently bookmarked in my brain. But it has hurt the one thing I looked forward to in my daily life.
It is no longer a goal to personally speak to someone about their days, their lives, what they’re doing, who they’re with, etc. If you want to know anything, just check Facebook, right?
It has not only killed the core of human interaction, but it has structured people to become self-absorbed. If only there were a “no one cares” button to click.
Too often do I have friends come up to me asking me why they can’t find me on Facebook. And too often do I get a pat on the back and told, “You’re smart, I wish I could do that.”
To think people check their news feed more than they pick up a newspaper or read an article online scares me for the future of our world.
Noam Chomsky, who is sometimes referred to as "the father of modern linguistics,” said we are born with a innate blueprint for language.
My 9-year-old niece already has a Facebook. I didn’t activate mine until my freshman year at Central Michigan University. I don’t intend on not returning to Facebook, but since deleting it, I have yet to consider reactivating my account.
I do miss the photos, the statuses worth liking and the ability to learn more about what my friends think is interesting.
But what I don’t miss, as Grizzly Bear so kindly put it via Twitter, is: “Every time I log into Facebook there’s a newborn baby picture I feel obliged to ‘like.’”
