“No employee is allowed to be more than a 100 feet away from a food source.”
This is what was said to me during a tour of Google New York last year. While it’s all cool and everything, this statement also really translates to society’s current connection to the web. That statement could very easily be:
“No person is allowed to be more than a 100 feet from a web source.”
We are a connected society. The way we function today encourages us to be wired. Of all of my friends, I was one of the last to get a Facebook account. It was the fall of ninth grade that I succumbed to the pressures and gave my soul to Mark Zuckerberg and his team. I was excited.
My first post was typical, I was announcing to the 100 friends I had that I was now online. “Look at me world! I’m on the internet!” While no one really cared, I felt self-important.
Over the next year and a half I became one with my Facebook, tailoring my online identity to perfection. Facebook became an extension of my personal life instead of just a supplement. It was school, facebook, work, facebook, eat, facebook. This routine kept going until I decided halfway through tenth grade and 700 friends later that I was done and so I deactivated my account.
Let me just say that it wasn’t easy. First, there was the actual act of deactivating. Facebook didn’t want that. At every step they would ask why I was making this decision and at the top of each page was a sad and pathetic attempt to keep me.
“X friend is going to miss you.” It would say while showing a picture of a person that I hadn’t spoken to in a considerable amount of time.
The next challenge was actually staying off. The first week it was easy. I was on a confidence high. I, Lovia Gyarkye, had disconnected. The idea of all the books I could read, TV I could watch and stories I could write was enough to propel me for a while.
Like a drug addict, I began to suffer through withdrawal. Even though I had so much time to waste now, I was still missing inside jokes, funny posts and was forced to remember birthdays! Despite these difficulties I stayed off Facebook for a while and eventually found my way back around 11th grade.
Since returning, my attitudes about Facebook have changed. I no longer need to really check it every day. Sometimes my notifications get to unreasonable levels but that doesn’t cause me to freak out anymore.
What surprised me even more was that as I got older I began to use Facebook in more interesting ways. It wasn’t just a place to play FarmVille and other Zynga games. Instead, I was actually reconnecting with friends, using it for school events and groups and to me getting the full effect of social networking without becoming an addict.
The time I had to disconnect really allowed to me form my own opinions about how I was going to social network my life.