Intellectual and Social Black Hole

Since it's launch in 2004, according to the site, Facebook has acquired over 500 million active users worldwide and that number continues to grow. This can be seen as a positive way of networking and making friends, however many people may not even know most of their "friends" and only speak with them via Facebook.

Is this phenomenon to blame for our generation's detachment from the "real" world and for our lack of communication skills?

On average, I go on Facebook several times a day. The first thing I look at is my newsfeed, which is usually full of photos of people my "friends" are friends with and the random status updates of someone I sat next to in high school science class. Next, a chat box will usually pop up on my screen from someone I should have probably just called on the phone instead of spending time impersonally typing back and forth for minutes on end.

Facebook also allows users to say and do things that they wouldn't normally in real life. For instance, lets say you add your crush from math class without ever actually speaking to them the entire semester. This, in-turn, causes an awkward tension between the two of you and does nothing to improve your actual relationship. So, was being able to creep on old photos of them from 2007 really worth it?

Another thing that promotes complete isolation from face to face contact is the wall-to-wall feature on the site. Instead of speaking to someone, many choose to just write on each other's "walls." These cyber conversations can consist of one person saying: "Haay guuuurrl" and the other replying "Wat's up!? " for seemingly no reason whatsoever. These conversations can, and usually do, drag on and on, with each wall post more grammatically incorrect than the next.

Facebook messages, similar to e-mail, can also work as a tool for those unsure what to say in person. If a friend is being bitchy, or you're simply sick of your current boyfriend or girlfriend, being passive aggressive is often the way our generation will confront these issues. Instead of telling people off in "real" life, many chose to write lengthy messages expressing their feelings in a very artificial, meaningless way, and in my experiences, this type of hate mail does nothing to improve any situations, if anything it only makes me angry.

One would think that all this extra writing would improve our speaking skills, however I hear the word "like" more than ever while having casual conversation with most teenage girls I know. Slang has also become socially accepted as the normal use of English language, causing much of this generation to sound more like Lil Wayne and less like future presidents.

I can't say that Facebook single handedly caused this intellectual and social black hole in America, however, being the number one social networking site out there, it definitely helped. After all, how can we lead successful lives when we can't even interact with other humans in the "real" world?