The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

Breaking the Addiction: Facebook Perspectives

It seems as though the entire world is on Facebook—at least, the world I am concerned with. In fact, there are more than 500 million active Facebook members and 50% of them log on to Facebook in any given day.

Now this may sound insane to the nonusers and those who deem themselves “above the influence,” but in the world of social networking, Facebook seems like a must. Recently, however, a fad has been infiltrating the system: quitting. Facebook is an addiction, no doubt about that.

There are different perspectives and opinions concerning Facebook and quitting. Below, different members of The Pitch present ideas regarding their experiences with the addictive website. Since there are not any current members of The Pitch who have never had any contact with Facebook, the perspective of a non-user is not represented.

Taliah Dommerholt: Temporary Quitter

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A few weeks ago I decided to hop on the bandwagon and deactivate my account. Okay, so it’s probably a little early to call it the bandwagon—because obviously Facebook is the more profound bandwagon of the moment—but anyway, I quit. For an entire week, I saw what it was like to come home and actually do my homework, because there was nothing else to do.

This may sound extreme, but it was like entering a vacuum. Suddenly I found myself in complete and utter silence. And I’m not saying one would go through a withdrawal that rivals that of nicotine or sex, or whatever else you can become addicted to. But, it’s definitely not a walk in the park. I didn’t receive invitations to New Year’s parties, forgot about birthdays and temporarily lost contact with my friends that do not live in the area.

The bottom line, I realized, is that we may hate Facebook and what it supposedly does to us, but we rely on it to infinite degrees. It seems that the most feasible solution is limitation. Everything in moderation is supposedly okay for us, right? So you don’t have to quit your Facebook to bring up your grades, read more books, or get out and exercise more often. Obviously face-to-face contact with friends is more beneficial and simply more enjoyable than contact through statuses and wall posts, after all.

The main reason that I use Facebook is for the chat aspect, but seriously, most people have Skype or some other form of communication as well. So technically we don’t even need Facebook, other than to support our low self-esteems. And don’t forget the cellphones.  In fact, many times I find myself texting one friend, chatting another and Skyping yet a third.

This addiction to communication most definitely takes away from what is actually important in my life, such as school work and more personal forms of communication.

But seriously, the only way I would permanently quit my Facebook is if everyone else did as well, because I could not stand to be out of the loop. And that, I’m sure, is the sad truth for most of us.

Sophie Meade: Quit Cold Turkey

There is almost nothing as exhausting as sifting through your homepage’s ‘Minifeed,’ status after status, comment after comment, ‘like’ after ‘like.’ Nothing except explaining to rabid Facebookers why the social network is not only a pathetic use of time, but a grave danger to our generation’s communication skills.

Aside from just exhausting, it’s awfully depressing to come face-to-face with the drone known as a teenager in 2011. I often find myself entirely paralyzed with horror at the skewed values Facebook fosters and the ignorance of the general user population when prompted to give an explanation for my views. But enough of the melodramatics.

It seems most logical to start my Facebook story with the day I sent my account to bed (or to hell). But my attachment to the site really began to crumble months earlier, when I first recognized the pointlessness of nearly every interaction that occurred. With the exception of necessary communication with long-distance friends, the vast majority of social exchanges that take place on Facebook have no redeemable value whatsoever.

And notice I said redeemable. Many people find worth in photo comments that boost their faltering self-esteem, comment wars that give them a sense of pride and posts that make them feel like a desirable person in some way. Problem is, they’re building their own self-worth on a foundation of illusions.

But what if you aren’t an insecure confidence-seeker, and you just enjoy Facebook for the opportunities it provides you to interact with friends? Opportunities? I just don’t see how a structured forum put on display for hundreds and possibly millions to view can provide any valuable opportunities for interaction.

In order to do anything on Facebook, you have to cooperate with the structure: fill out a status, post a video, make a comment. Is that really how you would like to communicate with people? Or rather, is that how you need to communicate with people? Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to: a need, as a result of our constantly disintegrating ability to communicate with one another.

It’s ridiculous to even try to deny that our generation’s excessive use of Facebook will not eventually (if it hasn’t already) make our social skills reliant on virtual interaction. And that’s terrifying. I don’t know about you, but I want to be able to express myself in verbal conversation, to be able to read others’ body language and points of inflection. Without Facebook, my expression is safe with me.

Ali Jawetz: User

Facebook.com is, above all, a mode of communication. I check it and care about it just as much as I do my cell phone or my e-mail, because it is a way that I can keep in touch with my friends and keep track of my various extra-curricular activities.

Yes, I admit, I am on the site more than I probably should be, and it definitely has an addictive quality. But it is also the main way for others to contact me and vice versa. When I heard that some people were deleting their Facebooks (mostly because of their grades), I did consider deleting mine as well. However, this was around the same time that my phone broke, so without Facebook I would be relatively cut off from my friends.

Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with distant companions. Especially for someone like me who has a lot of friends who do not go to WJ, Facebook is extremely helpful in maintaining relationships.  I can keep up message threads with people that I rarely see, and therefore still have something that connects us, so we avoid awkward encounters when we do eventually see each other.  With Facebook, I am more likely to talk to old friends, both on the website and in person, because we still have the association of being Facebook “friends.” Facebook does not have to replace personal interaction — instead, it can strengthen personal encounters by being the link between people over time.

One of my friends does not have a Facebook due to parental restrictions, and she misses many messages from her friends and her youth group, lacks reminders for birthdays and has no way to view the pictures of herself that have already been posted. I just don’t think I could deal with that level of seclusion. Because of this, the only ways that I would be able to fully delete my Facebook would be: a) all my friends also deleted theirs, or b) I found out the privacy settings were in fact faulty and it would be unsafe to have one.

I suppose this goes to show that my social network is that important to me, which I’m not sure I’m proud of. But especially after seeing “The Social Network” and reading the book it is based on, The Accidental Billionaires, I can recognize that – healthy or not – Facebook was an ingenious invention.

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