Webupon

I just don’t get it.  Why is it that perfectly normal individuals are so hooked on a website that encourages you to invite strangers to be your friends, to get in touch with a bunch of people that you’ve already cut out of your life and to display it all so publicly.

Friends reunited didn’t seem like a bad idea.  If you genuinely wanted to get in touch with people, you had to pay for the privilege.  So It does what it says on the tin. 

I can appreciate over the years as you grow up, people fall out of your life and you find yourself wandering ‘what the hall happened to them’.  So you look them up and get in touch.  Friends reunited was a middleman and nothing more, so how did we go from that to poking people on a webpage?

I find myself asking the question ‘how lonely are we?’. 

A friend of mine got sucked into this recently. Understandable, she’s a single mom with 3 kids and once there tucked away in bed, she likes to relax with a glass of wine and chat away with her friends.   When I say chat, I mean ‘type words on a computer screen and hope for a reply’.

Let me set a common ‘Facebook’ scene as told to me by many people.  You’ve located an old school friend and sent your requests, poked each other, brought a drink, chatted away, went over old times remembering the good old days, before eventually meeting up for a coffee.  Innocent enough.  That is until you realise that actually, you don’t have anything in common, all those annoying habits that were so innocently blocked out of your mind, are there, contacting you every single day by text, phone, email, poking, twittering and on and on and on.

This is a warning to anyone considering the lurid temptation of ‘Facebook’…it may sound like a lot of fun, but at the end of the day, its you, a screen and a bunch of people you already escaped. 

Put down the keyboard, move away from the desk and LIVE in the real world!  You never know who you might meet.