Author: Leah Glowacki
I can still recall the eighth-grade epic evolution from an AIM profile to a Myspace page.
Song lyrics, celebratory icons, and shout-outs to our BFFs gave way to streaming music, photo albums, and a Top 8. Then, when high school made skinny jeans mandatory, Facebook replaced Myspace as the new networking website. Both sites exemplify the benefits of technology but also threatened our enjoyment of simplicities.
Through Myspace and Facebook we can find the friends with whom we played Crazy Bones in fifth grade, whose lives we’ve wondered about since they moved across the country the summer before middle school. The sites also allow users to multitask–chatting in the classic AIM fashion while simultaneously sending several email-like messages to friends or relatives. They advertise events, organize clubs, and even offer information about local opportunities.
Beyond appealing to bored students’ curiosity and overwhelmed individual’s need for some mental ease, Facebook and Myspace also contribute to globalization, or the growing integration of economies and societies around the world. According to Bnet.com, financial news site, Facebook recently asked users to help expand its network to include 22 additional languages. Oceans no longer limit casual conversation or consequential collaboration.
As potential benefits of button-based conversation appear to abound, negative consequences also emerge. During my first year at Oxy, I’ve learned that being a college student means having half the time you truly need to complete laundry lists of obligations. More importantly, I realize that sanity requires walking away from the lists and pursuing relaxation and entertainment. Social networking is often employed during study breaks in efforts to free the mind. While this may not be a universal consensus, I find that after five minutes of photo browsing–often of people I don’t know–I return to my reading or writing with equal tension. One half of About.com’s top 10 stress management techniques require bodily movement (breathing exercises, exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, sex and yoga). I won’t suggest fornication behind a bookshelf, but I do believe that evidence of the effectiveness of exercise to reduce stress suggests the antithetical ineffectiveness of attempting to relieve nervous tension while continuing to stare at a computer screen.
If Facebook is your successful stress reliever, fair enough. It may be wise for us to throw a Frisbee around with friends in order to cope with writers block, as opposed to investigating the relationship status of that boy or girl that sits behind us in class. However, I primarily view Facebook and Myspace as enemies of our appreciation of genuine conversation and simple pleasure. Conversation can be more than the exchange of words. It can be an exchange of emotions. What makes certain discussions exceptional are not necessarily what participants say, but the hand gestures they employ, their smile, or the fire in their eyes. The words within a 2″x2″ Facebook chat box are emotionless.
As I am consistently satisfied by Facebook, therefore, getting no interaction or movement, I fear that I will forget how much I do enjoy playing catch which involves finding a football, gathering friends, and putting on gym shoes. In many homes, Madden replaces family football games and movies substitute Monopoly. Will social networking likewise be the alternative to late-night conversations over coffee?
Madden video grames and movies are undeniably entertaining and only problematic when their flash and easy accessibility force us to forget the goose-bumps of our Dad’s praise, “Where did you learn to throw like that?” or the stomach-ache inducing laughter after the discovery that your sister stole all the five-hundred dollar bills. In a similar fashion, Facebook and Myspace offer awesome benefits from which we should not run away. Addiction, marked by 30+ minutes of status searching or hourly status changes, should be avoided. If we actually get out of our desk chairs and walk down the hallway to ask our neighbors how they completed #5 on the chemistry homework, instead of “facebooking” them, we’ll reap benefits and avoid the negative side effects of the Facebook revolution.
Leah Glowacki is an undeclared first-year. She can be reached at glowacki@oxy.edu.
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