FB suicide

Yes, committing Facebook suicide is really tempting. And Carmen Joy King brings up a lot of excellent points of why quitting Facebook would be beneficial to our livelihoods. King says that Facebook markets a false community, and in turn, we potentially lose our real ones. While this is true to an extent, I feel as though Facebook can also help enhance our real communities. I know that keeping in touch with my friends from high school would be really difficult without Facebook and social networking. Yes, the news I do give them with phone calls or letters or even e-mails would be much more important and meaningful, however, updates would probably not be given often. As artificial as my high school friends' Facebook profiles are, and as narcissistic their photos of their new friends and lives may be, I still appreciate feeling like I know what is going on in their lives a little more than I would normally. As King said, it is finding the balance between the virtual and real worlds.

King's comments on our generation being very individual-oriented is true. We have to be really self-absorbed and find a lot of value in our own opinions and thoughts to think that everyone else would care about them too, and that our "friends" would want to see our photos and status updates. I post photo albums for friends to see, and I'm sure on another level, to offer up my life to be judged by "friends" that I only vaguely know and feel that can form a slightly different (and hopefully higher or more accurate) opinion of me after. It's narcissistic — definitely. But it's also how our interactions and opinions of each other have been newly socially constructed.