Obsession with social network overrated

Ben Sadkowski/Staff Writer

With all the things that consume my time these days, one of the last things I’ve wanted sucking up my minutes is Facebook.
The popularity of Facebook is staggering: The Facebook application available for iPhone and iPod Touch is the most downloaded application of all available in the iTunes Application Store. In December of 2008, digital marketing research company, comScore recorded Facebook having 220 million unique users.

The popularity is not understated; when my journalism class discovered that there was a new filter blocking out Facebook, we immediately got to work locating a proxy that would let us access our beloved accounts. Evidently we care about Facebook a lot, perhaps too much if we waste our class time trying to check if anyone wrote on our walls in the past seven hours.

Lots of my peers confess to a Facebook addiction of sorts, one that has them checking their page at least six times a day if they have access to a computer. Most people can agree that even if we log in just to “check our notifications” we end up clicking on one link, which leads to another, and then another.

The justification of using Facebook is often that it is a tool of communication. Why then do we have e-mail? For me, Facebook poses too much of a distraction and is completely unnecessary for day-to-day communication via the Internet. When I write e-mails I find that I choose my wording a lot more carefully than in a message over Facebook.

I’ve logged in once since April 19, and I don’t have a single regret.