You've gotta love when a basic notion - let's say developing a well-interfaced means of communicating with people you might not otherwise communicate with readily - gets blown out of proportion and driven into obscurity by commercialization and society's natural desire for attention.
I check my Facebook account more than I check my email now. I make significantly more communications per day via Facebook than I do with my phone. It's a fantastic resource for sharing my unique momentary thoughts, posting song lyrics for my peers to critique, planning events, remembering birthdays, connecting names to faces, and just keeping in touch with people in general. But then there's the completely pointless crap: "Dear Facebook, I just ate a bagel." "That test SUCKED." "Going to sleep now; good night all!" "Im so drunl rughy noe hahha i lofr youj facerbokk :))))" et cetera. We've all seen stuff like that, and even worse: we all POST stuff like that. You even see it here.
A lot of people recognize how pointless it is, but maybe it's not pointless. When I'm not sleeping (8 hours per day) or at school/out and about (6 hours per day average), I'm on the computer. Not necessarily actively on Facebook, but if I'm on the computer I have Firefox open with tabs for Facebook, Kumoricon, Meebo, and sometimes gmail, wikipedia, and a few other sites. That means I spend about 10 hours per day on average existing, to some degree, in cyberspace. My means of human contact are partly or entirely dependent on my connection to the internet. The funny thing about cyberspace is that it's like a cave, and empty cave, devoid of everything except the wires that connect us and a very small window upon which we can display anything our resources can produce. We have complete control over whom and what we see through this window, and a moderate degree over what we can present for others to see, but it's up to them to actually see it.
So let's say that that median 70% of the population - everyone within 1 standard deviation of the mean - spends anywhere from 6 to 10 hours per day "wired in" (likely a conservative estimate). That means that 1/3 of our existence takes place in cyberspace, 1/3 takes place in dreamland (where we have only our own psychosis to keep us company), and 1/3 takes place in the "real world". It's an introvert's paradise - an extrovert's nightmare. Most people aren't completely introverted or extroverted though. In fact, most people are very balanced. They like to have a balance of time completely alone, time among others, and time with controlled contact. The internet represents controlled contact. What used to be time home alone with the family is now time home alone with the internet. Since the 1/3 divisions have become so widely standard for most people, that puts the folks who lean more heavily towards extroversion in a pickle. It's socially awkward, in the cyber age, to make up that difference in societal needs through family contact, so the extroverts find an outlet. Those who are heavily extroverted, like myself, live through sites like facebook, constantly IMing 3-5 people at once, posting status updates all the time, and reading 300+ status updates, links, et cetera DAILY. The more moderate extroverts aren't so extreme, but they can be far more annoying. A quiet shout for attention can often be a lot more obnoxious than a loud and energetic party animal.
And thus you get the flood of frequent, trivial status updates, worthless forum posts, and "wasted time." However, it's all there for a reason. What we usually see as droll annoyances are really a valuable means of retaining universal social sanity. Just figured I'd share my thoughts. How about yours?
