Facebook, Blackberry & the Moments In Passing – (2)

…continued from PART (1)

You know it when you feel it. University of Southern California’s recent study suggests that social webs such as twitter and Facebook ‘could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to suffering’. Think of it, before the brain can process the anguish of a story, it’s bombarded with countless more; a potpourri of laughter and anguish in marathon succession. Another’s crushing experience is just another wall post that passes as the ‘Most Recent” arrives. Imagine the picture of burnt and charred babies – victims of the Jos crisis and a hilarious image of swaging friends from a night-out with thirty seconds in-between, on and on. Facebook, undoubtedly, is the internet’s ultimate time sink. Facebook addiction, a fast popularizing term echoes subtle personality demerits; the need for immediacy, an exhibitionist control of one’s affairs – ‘I am the master of my homepage’. Interestingly, these virtues: Control, Influence and Management require learning, deliberateness and time. They are products of study and experience under REAL life conditions. When blogging becomes a compulsion; a precipitous prodding to ‘get-out’ of real life – in the middle of a sermon, during work hours, lectures – and live on the intellection of some five hundred virtual posts, when a dissociation from your real world becomes more enjoyable than real life, then you probably just signed up to the exclusive ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ club! Beware, it is infectious. I have met infected persons severally. Typical Symptoms: A person chats away in Church on Sunday while Pastor reads from Rev 22:15. With Blackberry in hand and Bible spread open to Psalm 23:1, he’s in a virtual world where all things are beautiful. Suddenly, he’s smiling and soliloquizing but Pastor just said to intercede for cancer patients. Now service is over, and Brother Goodness walks up to him and says‘hi’. Reflexively, he returns the favor but already said ‘thanks for the poke, Tracy’. On Monday morning, he signs the log at work, and then signs into Facebook – he’s yet to outline the week’s plan! But for social networking, how else would we keep in touch with so many college colleagues and friends? You probably wouldn’t get to read this. And it is not for nothing that the Egyptian Government, indeed many other regimes have attempted to shut down social webs during protests and revolutions. Clearly, it suffices to say that social networking has come to stay, but while we harness the good of it, we must manage its evils. Indeed, we must be in control. In February 2010, statistics for Facebook alone tripled the time cumulative the average internet user spent online in 2009, and that figure is a whopping seven hours daily. If you spend seven hours daily ‘facebooking’, at the end of the year, you’ve spent three and half months online. You’ll spend nearly three of the next ten years chatting and making comments. Simply put, if you’re aged twenty-five, by the time you’re seventy; you’ve spent time on Facebook equivalent to two terms as Governor and One term as President! Our lives consist of moments, seemingly harmless passing fragments of deceptively slow time. While America has landed scientists on the face of the moon and hopes to have one million electric vehicles on the road in 2015, Africa has not. We must ambitiously invest in intellectual capacity, scientific discovery and patents. Never should we ever imagine; never should we ever pretend that we can afford the luxury of a babbling and yapping generation. “The heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight, But they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night”–Henry Lnagsworth Longfellow Indeed, our social consciousness must be guided by these fundamental questions: What do we do with it? How can we use it well? Let the thinking begin.