A technological gilded age.
An instantaneous era where the world is literally at your fingertips.
All this wonder and convenience we have become accustomed to: electronic mail, text messages, facebook. facebook, facebook, facebook.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm well addicted. It's an obsession sometimes. I can sit there for hours with no new messages or wall posts, having absolutely no business wasting time, mindlessly searching. What do I do? Look at profiles, other people's pictures, My pictures. Oh! That's when you know it's out of control-when you start to sift through your own photo albums as if they are new discoveries, as if you yourself did not take the pictures, upload them, tag and caption them.
But, that's just the beginning of the frustration with facebook. Friends. Who are your friends? My friends, some family, co-workers and boyfriends past. As if it wasn't awkward enough that our social networking has gone from face-to-face to face-to-facebook, you have to deal with the unending temptation to spy on ex-boyfriends' facebook profile pages.
I'm not ashamed. I do it. And, I Know people do it to me. Sometimes, when I feel really creepy, I'll make sure to leave a comment. For some reason, that makes me feel like I seem to have had a purpose going to the page to begin with, even though we all know I certainly did not.
It doesn't stop me from doing it. The only way I can stop doing it is to cut myself off. Completely! And, as silly as it may seem, that's really hard to do. I'd like to believe that I wouldn't want to de-friend or block an ex on fb because I'm the bigger person, and I am mature enough to handle a post-breakup friendship. That's partly true. But, I think the bigger issue is that if I did that (assuming I could figure out how to do that), I wouldn't be able to satisfy my hunger for internet espionage, both spying...and being spied on. It's so mysterious, I can't help it! I think as an early birthday gift to myself I might farm through my fb friends, and weed out a few of the tempting ones.
I've long said that I wished facebook had "Enemies" as well as "Friends". What a hilarious concept it would be to receive a "Facebook Enemy Request". But, then again, if you had access privileges to your enemies' pages, you would still be able to waste hours of your time poking and prodding.
