Is FACEBOOK the new Second Life?
How many of us spend hours a day on Facebook, whether it is just interacting with friends and acquaintances or playing some Facebook games to immersing oneself in the whole online social fabric, from collecting and posting recipes and useful information, to blogging, to online garage sales, to current news, to sharing and organizing events, to commenting on current issues affecting our local community, our State or the nation as a whole or engaging in full scale discussions and activism.
It seems that just about every online social community links back to Facebook or is conducted on Facebook personal pages, fan pages, community pages or business pages.
There seems to be two diametrically opposed schools of thought about Facebook. It is an horrendous waste of time and we could better direct our time and energies into more productive pursuits.
Or, it enhances our daily lives in a way unimaginable only a decade or so ago. There are, in fact, many benefits including the aforementioned social interaction, which is essential for our emotional and mental well being, which in turn either positively or negatively affects our physical well being.
Then there is the enormous learning potential it offers, simply by interacting with more people than we could possibly accommodate into our physical lives. I believe that if we don’t learn something new, and hopefully useful, every day that we are in fact wasting our lives.
I know myself that interacting with people on Facebook has taught me new things, some good, some bad! Facebook discussions have also caused me to research more things, yeah mostly political I know, but I have learned a great deal from it that I would not otherwise have learned!!!
And, as with a lot of research, sometimes I come across something that may be completely off topic, but is interesting and informative or just damn amazing and out of this world, or sometimes just damn sick!
I do believe all this gives us more insight into our immediate physical world that we interact with each and every day as well as the world around us with all its amazing, awe-inspiring beauty and diversity, from the cultures of people past and present to the amazing wildlife and plant life on our planet and the incredible spectacle of natural and man-made wonders.
Hell, we can even sit at our computer and travel all round our own world via Google Earth and into the depths of our solar system and deep space.
As long as we still attend to our regular obligations and responsibilities and physically interact with family and friends on a regular basis then I think it is a great thing. The moment it starts to take over our life and we start shirking those obligations, responsibilities and interactions, that is the time we have to take stock and make adjustments. But that is no different to anything in life is it?