I think you should come over to Myspace so I can Twitter your Facebook
Since the dawn of Windows 95, students have found themselves scrambling at the eleventh hour to deliver their assignments on time. Sneaking along the corridor, mentally kicking themselves for not doing this earlier, students question how exactly they woke up, prepared to write a research essay, but ended up killing six hours on Facebook?
Perhaps the blame lies with Generation X. Doomed by the Baby Boomers to be the generation that would never amount to anything except plaid shirts, MTV, and a sense of entitlement, Gen X just had to prove everyone wrong and capitalise on the development of the World Wide Web. This has cursed Generation Y with the power to reduce grade averages with a few simple clicks.
Like most of Gen Y, I don’t remember spending a great deal of the nineties trawling various web pages. Grades for primary school assignments were hinged on actually visiting the school library, which always smelt like stale bread, wet dog, and socks. The first decade of my life was internet-free. I want to say it was a peaceful time but I don’t remember much of how I spent my spare moments, except that I dedicated several afternoons of my school week to softball, netball, cricket, and running.
This is no longer the case.
Instead of pretending to be athletic, the internet was heavily abused by Gen Y in high school for Wikipedia and social networking sites—an anti-social means of communication and ridicule. Furious after school conversations over MSN, where hotgurrrrl13 mercilessly flirted with sexcboiiii16, were replaced with Myspace and its inbred cousin, Bebo. Already plagued by acne, puberty, and life in general, teenagers were subjected on both sites to the cruel practice of ‘Top Friends’, being tagged in photo albums of drunken exploits, and the soul-crushing Bebo experience of being dumped as ‘The Other Half’.
Poor unfortunate souls.
Now we have Facebook! It’s slightly nicer, better looking, and often the perfect Austen gentleman until it explains “Oops! Something went wrong!” It’s also easier to watch the lives of your friends, frienemies, relatives, and one-night-stands fall apart dramatically through status updates. While Facebook does paint society in a lovely shade of schadenfreude, it has an annoying knack of eating up all our time, time I am sure we used better before the World Wide Web became a black hole of grades, assignments, and lives.
Facebook aside, I recently tallied my internet ‘most-visited-sites’ and came back with Facebook (shocking), YouTube, Overheard in New York, The Oatmeal, and Lamebook, which is like Facebook (again, shocking), only it focuses on the most spectacular of awkward social fails. But with several assignments due in a week and exams fast-approaching, I’m boycotting Facebook. Lying on my couch, I can’t imagine how on Earth I wasted six hours on this website…
Ooh! A witty page with an amusing title I can relate to: ‘when sluts hate other sluts for being sluts’. I must like this.