PEA RIDGE — My good friend Mark once spent an entire morning talking only in Facebook statuses. You know, instead of “I’m hungry,” it was “Mark wants a breakfast burrito from Carvers ... mmm ...”
Facebook is a blessing and a curse.
In my lifetime, some major things have occurred throughout the world - the fall of the Berlin Wall, Desert Storm, 9/11, an African American elected president - to name a minute few. But there are some things that I can remember never existing and then all of a sudden being there and thinking the world would be weird without them.
No one can hide from technology.
When I went to see movies as a child, the screen never commanded anyone to turn off their cell phones. And even now, that has changed from just a short time ago, the message is pretty much no cell phone, no texting, no bluetooth - or else.
In an airport last summer, waiting to board the plane, a guy came over the loud speaker and nearly screamed “Someone dropped a cell phone!” as if it was a small child gone missing. Mass chaos ensued, people would have frantically pushed aside their actual small children to make sure it wasn’t theirs.
When saying good-bye, it’s no longer correct tosay “I’ll call you.” Nope, it’s “I’ll text you,” or “Facebook me.”
I can’t hide it, I’m an addict like most of the rest of the world, if not worse.
I check my Facebook during breakfast, at lunch, when I get home from work and pretty much any other time I can. I have been known to be in the same room with someone and not speak to them, but rather chat with them through Facebook. It has taken over a good chunk of my free time. Technology gets more and more impersonal as the years go on and we just go with it.
On the other hand, I can see new pictures of my 4-year-old godson in Colorado right after they’re taken. I can leave funny messages to his mother, my best friend, to brighten her day when she’s down.
I have rekindled friendships that might otherwise have been lost due to busy lives. So it seems addiction has its tradeoffs.
Hand me an iPhone and I’ll stare at it, then hand it back because I don’t know how to work it. I get made fun of for having the same cell phone for five whole years. I am a lot of things, but technology savvy is not one.
Thank goodness there is Facebook, easy to use and universal, so everyone I know can know exactly what I am doing or feeling or watching or planning at every second. And I can know everything about everyone in return. I can like the things I like and unfriend you (yes, that’s a real word) if I want to be snooty.
Cassi Lapp is amazed at the world we live in.
Opinion, Pages 4 on 12/09/2009