Fakebook

Social networking sites are the new friends. How many minutes, hours in a day do you spend staring into a screen, scrolling through past friends, new friends, maybe friends you would like to be friends with...? Question is, although these sites are great staying in touch with someone a few thousand miles away, how much quality time and effort is really being put into the friendship with the person that is only a town away from you?

I know our generation has been reduced to screens and mobile phones, communication to the outside world seems to be the biggest business alongside porn and food. However, through all of this communication, how much of it is actually quality intentions and how much are we trying to avoid picking up the phone because there's just too much contact?

The days I had my phone turned off and buried in the back of the drawer, were the days I felt free, like a weight had been lifted. It was like I was time-warped back to the 80's when you had to stick to the date you made over the phone and if you were late you missed out! The world was my oyster without a mobile phone and I could flawlessly float through it because no one knew my face from a picture online, no one had my latest status update and no one could get past the voice-mail...

As much as I like the idea of FB, it also has its shallow sides. Lets face it, the 400+ people on my friends page, ain't all friends that I know or shared a past/present with. However, I have an excuse - I have a band and the more people "know" me and see my updates, the more people will at least have glanced at a status update once in a while to see when my next gig is. I guess that's the "networking" part of these social websites... I remember when an ex-friend of mine came storming into my room complaining that her younger sister had more friends than she had - "X is stealing all of my FB friends!" she said... hence the term ex-friend... Can't deal with shallow people like that.

I'm just curios to know how healthy this whole social networking is for people in the future. The amount of ugly comments I have read on youtube sites is beyond believable. The fact that behind the screen, we feel safer to say whatever we think and post it online, especially judgmental adjectives. It's like we've decided to become the brutal judges on X-factor (which I will also change to Fake Factor) and we're writing people off on the internet before we even give them a chance in reality.

I read a while back, that the reason most of the youths today are crude and rude to people in public is because they're losing their senses towards society. This could also be down to poor parenting, but being on the internet all the time is a ticking time bomb to losing touch with reality. The Internet has literally turned into Earth 2, and on Earth 2 you get a second life to be whatever sexy minx or murderous cadaver you want to be. You can also just be yourself...

If I had to choose between a real-life party and a fake-life party...