And I won’t deny it. I’ll be blatantly honest here and tell you that yes, I do love it. So stick that in your pipe and poke it.

When the now phenomenally popular social networking site first came into being, I was vehemently against signing up. Friends told me of its wondrous capacity to extend procrastination time from one hour to infinity and the multitude of games, quizzes and applications to try, but I was not convinced. I did not see the appeal in electronically communicating with friends nor spending hours online looking at photos of what they were up to. Admittedly my then addiction to MSN and Photobucket contradict that belief entirely.

For a few months I sneakily logged into my friend’s account, unbeknownst to her. As time went by (and I realised that I could stalk crushes in even more ways) I eventually caved and signed up.

What a mistake that was.

I am now a full blown Facebook addict. I cannot go without my daily fix and suffer withdrawal symptoms if away from it for too long. Some people my age do hard drugs, others alcohol and a very select few, freshly cut grass. I do Facebook.

I don’t spend hours and hours on the site. I take breaks and breathers and return to it every few hours or so to check up on my live feed. Just because I’m genuinely interested in the fact that John Smith ‘is so hung ova but goin out 2 get munted neway’ or that Sally Brown ‘is bored’*. My favourites are those who actively take time out at a party or other social gathering to update their status:

Ben Jones ‘is having a fantastic time at [insert trendy venue here] with all his friends’.

No, Ben. You’re ‘sitting by yourself in a corner’.

I mean, surely such an occasion is infinitely more interesting than whatever’s going on online – and even more surely, most of the social network that you’d wish to see your status are actually at said party or other social gathering.

All this talk about banal status updates is giving the impression that I’m hatin’ on FB. Well this is certainly not the case.

Thanks to this marvellous creation, as previously mentioned, I can stalk whoever and whatever I please. Friends from primary school? Easy. Ex-boyfriends? No worries. Grandma? Well, in my own grandmother’s unique case, yes.

I’ll admit that a lot of my time is spent looking at the pages of former flames. Not so much because I’m still enamoured (we’re talking primary and high school crushes here) but because I’m curious as to what they’re like now. Superficially, of course.
Some have blossomed (dammit) and others have – for want of a better term – been beaten a few too many times with the ugly stick (hoorah!).

But there’s an obvious danger to all this stalking – and not just the fact that it makes you seem like a shallow cow. When wounds haven’t quite had the time to heal, having an ex on Facebook can make the whole break-up ordeal incredibly more painful. Constant wall-to-walls from other girls (or boys) and photos of them out enjoying life while you’re pining at home with daytime television and blotchy skin, can make you feel downright terrible.

It’s times like these where one (because this is clearly entirely hypothetical) needs to actually withdraw from cyberworld and avoid any such activity. Excuse the preaching, but when Facebook starts to actually make you feel worse and you find yourself spending hours and hours hopelessly gazing at drunken and unsightly photos of your ex, believing that he (or she) is ‘still so attractive’, you know the situation is getting desperate. That’s when it’s time to delete them (or yourself) from Facebook.

Or, you could always take the more entertaining option of creating bogus accounts with male names and posting flirty messages on your own wall to hopefully make them jealous. Not speaking from experience, of course.

C.

*For the record, these people do not exist but merely represent the two worst extremes of status updates.