Facebook.
For what do we owe it?
It would seem Facebook is saving us gallons of time every day!
We no longer have to sit down and write letters, find the cordless phone to make calls, pull our phones out of our pockets to send texts, or open our mouths to ask what is for dinner.
OK, we may be losing a bit of our time to Facebook, but I'm sure it's a small price to pay for the window of opportunity it is giving us, to easily converse with our friends every day.
I'm sure most of us can recall a time in the past few days where we needed to talk to a friend about something.
It probably would have been best to see them in person or phone them up.
But we thought "nah, I'll talk to them on Facebook later."
It's incredible we can assume that from a certain time of night, the majority of our contacts will be in front of their computer scenes, devoting their attention to Facebook.
That is amazing, don't get me wrong.
But is it really healthy?
Do we not start to worry about ourselves when we are having full-on conversations with our keyboards, using technology to tell people what we think and feel when surely it would be more credible to be engaged in speech?
What has happened then to our ability to communicate intimately with people? When did we reduce our forms of communication to some keys on a keyboard, some abbreviated words and emotions?
Does it scare you when someone says "I'll ask them on Facebook; it would be way too awkward in person."
Yes, we are using Facebook to hide from scary confrontations, trusting it with our most serious relationships to the point where one day we will start proposing on Facebook (if it hasn't already happened).
Not to worry though, it's only Facebook.
We might spend a few hours on it at night, but we can easily put it aside and get on with our lives.
Right?
Wrong!
For my generation, talk of Facebook has a bigger influence over us than Ringo Starr did way back when.
I'm afraid that our lives are beginning to revolve around Facebook.
But how could we possibly give it up? In fact, we are our Facebooks.
For many people, Facebook has become the sole tool in defining their personalities.
It's both our security and our insecurity.
We rely on Facebook to make us feel loved, for our compliments and attention.
How many wall posts we got today and how many people liked our status.
What I'm trying to say is not that Facebook is evil, it's addictive or that we have all been brainwashed by the idea of Facebook and become mindless because of it and blindly obsessed.
I'm just saying we need to chill out, take a step back and think about what is real and what isn't, what is relevant to our lives and what's really important.
