Losing our humanity

How Facebook.com will lead to the end of the world

Jessica Stewin, Volunteer Staff/Illustrations by Kevin Doole

It lures you in with the promise of keeping track of old friends, finding new ones, and an endless supply of applications to spice up your new digital social life. Facebook.com. You can share your photos and videos and update your status so your friends know exactly where you are or how you’re feeling. You create your own online persona. When you wake up, you can check to see who broke up with whom yesterday and what applications your friends have added. You post on a few walls and return a couple super pokes. All this so-called “social interaction” is slowly leading to disaster. As we become more engulfed in our Facebook personas than our real lives, we risk the danger of losing our humanity. And for the following dangerous reasons, it has become clear that Facebook just may very well lead to the end of the world as we know it.

Eventually everyone you know or would dare associate yourself with is online; and at that point, you have to ask yourself whether there is really any need to see your friends face-to-face. This is “face-” book, after all. You can get a current photo of your friends, check their statistics (where they work, relationship status, places they’ve travelled, etc.); but really if you talked to them, what question could you possibly ask that could not be answered with a quick glance at their profiles?

There is no need for you to go out for coffee with your old friend when you can find out all you need to know on their profile and can even play a game of scrabble or have a food fight with them. Even dinner and a movie become obsolete when you can simply send a super poke and a naughty gift and get your intentions across plain and simple.

New friends are made with the clicking of a box, and so we are reverting ourselves back to an elementary school socializing where we could send notes that read: “Do you like me? Check yes or no.”

The reversion back into this simplistic networking interaction takes away our humanity. We are no longer social beings but entities within an online network. Staring blankly at a computer screen from inside a cold and lonely room, we say we are “socializing.” Facebook is allowing us to transition ourselves into android-like beings, without empathy or humanity, without real connection or emotion. We are creating our own social demise and thus ending the world as we know it.