Crackbook

The Facebook Epidemic! Madness!!!! Is this a new age cult movement or what. Why is "everybody" I know hooked on this thing (my humble self included)? People are facebooking at work, in elevators, while driving, from crackberries, i-phones, etc. What are they (we) doing on it exactly? Creeping on people's pages, gazing and critiquing their posted photos, looking out for who next will have a cool or funny 'status' update and the madness continues. Check out a computer near you, "anywhere", and chances are that someone's on facebook. Apparently, Facebook's been around for at least 4 years, but I and I know a million others, just caught on to it this year, with more people catching on by the hour! I find that I can't get through the day without logging on to it. And if I happen to be away from the internet for any significant amount of time, I find myslef going into withdrawal. Literally! And this is something I've witnessed all my 'friends' going through as well. What has this bloody thing ( and piece of joy) done to us? Taking up so much of our productive hours during the day? In the age of instant messaging, text messaging, real time emailing, "telephoning" even, I find that people have regressed to messaging via Facebook instead. I rarely get direct mails into my email box anymore. The messaging has now been diverted to my inbox on Facebook. People have gone off instant messaging and onto Facebook messaging instead, which is not as instant. It's crazy and I'm guilty of it too. What's the world coming to? It's comical but fascinating nonetheless.

Facebook, from what I understand was a social utility tool that was initially developed for college students. The demographics have changed vastly since then. The age groups on it vary from teeny-boppers to college students, to young working adults, to even slightly older adults (they even have a group on it called 'Agbayas on Facebook', which I found hilarious). The interaction communities also vary from deeply Nigerian social circles (or clicks), to southern African ones, to Kenyan ones, to Indian ones and so on. I check out my neice's page from time to time (she grew up in Sweden and no lives in France) and her circles are hugely Swedish and French also and activity is specifially in those languages!

I don't know what it is, but it's interesting and it's fun. Aside from contributing grossly to the rising unproductivity of individuals, I notice it serves also as an amazing networking and marketing tool at no cost. People are using it as a means of promoting their businesses and some are using it as faceless means of garnering attention to their otherwise shy selves. But you go everywhere and people are talking about Facebook, cackling over gist of what so and so is doing or what they said on someone else's page.

I was aware of other social utility forums, such as MySpace and Hi-Five etc, which I ignored and once thought to be silly things. But I was at a dinner party a month ago and it came up in conversation, i.e. Facebook vs. Hi-five (or whatever). I quickly chimed in and said Hi-5 is a fake Gucci bag and Facebook's the new Prada of social utility networks. And it's true!

I'm addicted..and happily so. I wonder, where was this stuff when I was in college? I probably would never have made it to class!!

Mark Zuckerberg, you're definitely on to something here. You've single-handedly redefined the whole concept of "friends" and "friendship"!