…i deactivated it. big woopdeedoo. haha.. remember in the movie, the social network, mark zuckerberg and justin timberlake talk about how they have yet to really understand what facebook is? i wondered about that too (this is a lot of thinking on facebook and it seems like such a rolling of the eyes subject but i am convinced that there will be ph.d. theses and acclaimed academic papers written on its phenomenon! i mean there was a best picture contending movie on it) ANYWAY, so i was motivated by various reasons.. one of them being the curiosity of what it would be like to not have it. i had facebook when it first opened up to umich.. which was in like 2003 or 2004. back then there were less than 20 colleges on it. so yeah it’s been a while. this may be a stretch but i realized that having facebook, no matter how much or how little you’re on it, is sort of like having or being in a different life/world. because essentially it’s the life you portray of yourself virtually. obviously, it is an amazing networking/keeping in touch tool but really.. at the end of the day, unless you’re completely unaware/unconscious of the fact that your activity is being shared by the network you’re in, facebook is a tool/mechanism for giving people hints, however small or large, about you. and also, besides the fact that i was just spending a lot of unnecessary time on it in class or to procrastinate studying, i had an epiphany about desiring to focus on the real life i’m in, not the virtual one.
but alas, after about two days of deactivating facebook, i’m realizing that the life we are in encompasses this life we have on the internet. the world has gotten to this point. as thomas friedman put so eloquently, we’re living in the information age, which is driven by the internet. and just really simply, it’s already becoming inconvenient to not have my facebook. i’m missing out on some sharing of information/news, the inability to rsvp to a church event we’re organizing, i can’t see updates from my family in korea, florida, california, and switzerland. facebook has become so prevalent it has come to the point where there is that expectation to make yourself available on it. one can argue that if you don’t have facebook, you’ll be keeping in touch with the people who really matter in your life.. and to a certain extent that’s true. but unless you feel like the networking system controls you, it’s really in your hands or your decision to keep in touch with whomever. facebook has become the tool for it. so i think the answer to the question of what facebook is or has become.. is that it’s really what you make of it on your own. it has come to mean different things for everyone individually. on the aggregate level… it’s sort of a mind-blowing thing.
