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“Brad is eating a donut”.
Those five words have just replaced the part of my brain storing Descartes’ sublime existential observation “I think therefore I am”. The more I use Facebook, the more banal information is replacing the interesting stuff stored in my primitive cortex. “Jenny can’t wait for the weekend”. That’s great – suddenly I understand Jenny much more deeply. I feel closer to her: I also can’t wait for the weekend. If only I could remember where I’d met Jenny. Or indeed if I have ever met her. Who the hell is this Jenny, and why is the rest of her week such a write-off? And why do I need to know that?
Luckily, my friends have sent me some weird virtual plants, want me to take a quiz about 80s sitcom stars, and have voted me ‘#9 Most Likely To Go Crazy With a Gun’. Now I feel much more loved.
I should poke someone and remind them that I exist.
But without the Facebook, I am nothing. No one could invite me to their parties, gigs or bar mitzvahs. Noone could write witty insults on my wall. I would cease to exist. Luckily “I Facebook, Therefore I Am”.
Maybe you work in a call centre, or maybe you’re between lectures and can afford to waste a few hours in the zany world of social networking, but what really spooks me is that somewhere out there, there’s a genius with the potential to find a cure for cancer or reverse global warming who’s going to be discovering that “Kylie is a fan of Sleeping” instead.
So before you head off to update your status, here’s some things you could be doing instead of wasting your life on Facebook.
- Sort your CDs by hue.
- Count to a billion-trillion by threes.
- Learn Klingon and teach it to children in Third World countries.
- Start and maintain an amateur porn website for Mormons.
- Write an iPhone application in binary code.
- See how much water you can drink before you dissolve.
- Reflect on the tragic life of Heath Ledger in real time.
- Research a way to bring peace to the Middle East using puppies.
- Give nicknames to every cell in your body.
- Print the internet.
- Call everyone in the world and see how much they liked Barack Obama’s acceptance speech.
- Take a photo of yourself every day for 18 years and upload it to YouTube.
- Calculate how many breaths you have taken since you were born.
- Translate the Bible (Old and New Testament) into Elvish.
- Find a happy financial advisor on Wall Street.
- Document all the factual errors in Wikipedia.
- Learn the names of everyone in China by heart and recite them back.
- Sing every song ever written in the key of G as a country ballad.
- Build a robot out of butter.
live in real time
Taking my medication to stop the senseless killing.
Memorize every phone book on the planet
Play bejeweled blitz
Create your own rudimentary form of the internet out of dogs and string.
Bookmark every page off the web with the word SINGLE in the title.
fear of a milk mustache
fear of a tooth paste mustache
Support the war in Iraq
Learn about ’scientology’
calulate the exact number of bugs, including undiscovered species.
Memorise a dictionary.
Then memorise every other dictionary ever published by its publisher.
Run for President! Hell, If Obama can do it, We all can! Yes We Can!!!
Go outside and follow the footsteps of Dino the Dinosour once you\’ve found them.
Count the number of individual hairs each of your arms.
Create and decipher a code to the bible that is far less interesting than The DaVinci Code, but three times more worthy of draining whatever’s left of Tom Hanks’ acting talent.
Learn the ancient art of Numphangfucin.
Spend more time on Gorskys…I’m a kiss arse!
learn the lyrics to every song in the world, then sing them through non-stop until you die
Open the curtains, step out the front door and see how the world has progressed over the past decade.
Re-visit my out dated MySpace page.
Actually do some work. My boss would be very appreciative.
Focus in on one pixel of your computer screen and wait for it to die.
NOT use facebook.
…then, I suppose, you could sit and come up with a list of better things to do…
Try to eat your own face