Facebook Mania

Just attended the most happening event of the town all decked up in the super hot outfit and you want the world to see it. No problem, it’s all just a click away. Being social has never become this easy. Updating ourselves regarding the happenings in our friends’ lives at such unprecedented rate was beyond our imagination few years back. But ever since the boom of social networking sites, the unsociable of the unsociable has realized how easy, fun and cool it is to be social in the cyber space. The ever increasing time and effort we put in order to remind everyone of our presence in the cyber space has earned us a netizen status.

Let’s face it; the power of social networking sites has charmed us like never before. Topping the social networking sites is probably Facebook. Getting in touch with our long lost friends has now become a cakewalk. All thanks to the soaring popularity of Facebook worldwide. With its zillion applications that we are hooked onto, it has become the Mecca of social networking sites. It has been quite a long time since I have become one of those Facebook fanatics who can stare at Facebook without batting an eyelid for at least an hour. There have been plenty of occasions when the first thing I do after getting up in the morning is log into Facebook and check my notifications and news feed. And most of the time I end up going through other people’s profile. Even when I sit for completing the assignment whose deadline is only a day away, I can’t help taking out 10-15 minutes every hour to check who is online and what the latest notification is.

Even though I am among many who are addicted to Facebook, the majority of such Facebook addicts are found on the other side of the globe. And all of this addictiveness has cost companies on the other side of the globe very dearly. www.surfcontrol.com , an internet filtering company, estimates that the site maybe costing Australian business $5 billion annually. This, however, has made Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, the youngest billionaire at the age of 24. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Facebook was recently valued between the lofty three billion to $15 billion.

Social networking is not a relatively new phenomenon. Not many know this, but the first social networking site that was created was www. sixdegrees.com was back in 1998. As my friend rightly puts in, “What, however, is new is that the cyber space has opened the doors to a parallel universe reducing us to mindless zombies where virtual add-ons are equivalent to real life milestones.”
From changing your relationship status online, to updating what you are upto every hour and uploading latest pictures (hoping for a list of flattering comments), isn’t a mark of your rising networking skills. Rather this reflects an acute lack of work in your life. Therefore, we need to keep the thin red line between real life and virtual life intact.