To 'Book or Not to 'Book

That is the question.




I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. We've been pretty rocky lately. Actually, our relationship has always been pretty rocky.

The summer before I went to college Facebook was just becoming hip. I immediately signed up, found my future roommate, stalked her all summer, and so it began.

Everyone at school had Facebook. You could look up the cute boys who lived in the dorm room downstairs or the cute boy you bumped into in the dining hall. You could search for long lost friends or past crushes (this was before anyone realized they should make their profiles private, and everyone could see everything). Hours were spent in the same room as other human beings while each one of us would be on our laptops, getting sucked into Facebook page after Facebook page. My roommate and I would be up until the early hours of the morning, not speaking for hours besides the rare, "Oh, go look at so-and-so's profile, they updated their interests and you just have to see it." (You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.)

Throughout college, this infatuation grew. Finally, I moved to South Africa for four months and just couldn't handle the pressure. I "deactivated" (read: canceled) my account. Facebook wanted to know why I was leaving. I selected every option (too much drama, too much time wasted on it, not purposeful, etc). I just didn't want to be wasting time in Africa on my computer at all, let alone a social networking site. Also, internet there was ridiculously expensive and Facebook's endless amounts of photos and videos just sucked up all my bandwidth. It was quick and clean.

I got back to America and the endless nights of jet lag forced me to find something to do online. I signed right back in and Facebook welcomed me with open arms. I knew I always loved it. I caught up on everything I had missed in the past four months and updated my profile. I even added pictures. We were happy again.

Fast forward a year. I never went on. I found that skimming through practical-strangers' photo albums really just didn't do it for me anymore. I wasn't as enthralled with snooping on who wrote what on whose wall yesterday at 3am. I'd get the infrequent emails informing me whose birthdays were coming up, and I just deleted them. If I really felt strongly about wishing someone a happy birthday, I'd just call them. And if I didn't have their number, well, I probably wasn't close enough to be wishing them happy birthdays anyway. I once again deactivated.

Just recently, I decided I needed to be more social. After much deliberation, I reactivated my account (again, Facebook let me right back in. So reliable). I realized that yes, I did miss it a teensy bit. I'm practicing self-control and not wasting every waking minute on it, but I do go on from time to time and see what's new. Before I knew it I was getting friend requests and weird group invitations and messages and realized that even my ex-boyfriend's mother was on it.

I used to scan each person's profile who friended me and decide if I should really accept or not. After all, some of these people I hardly even knew. Now, I don't care much. Facebook isn't the end-all-be-all and I really don't take it seriously. I'm not going to tell you if I'm looking for "A Relationship" or "Random Play" or "Just Friendship" and I'm not going to update my status every five minutes with what I'm doing next. While I will censor any pictures tagged of me and what people write on my wall, I'd probably think a little less of an employer if they didn't hire me on the grounds of something they saw on my Facebook page.

I still love Facebook, but we're really in more of an open relationship now. I don't care if the layout is changed every other week with new silly gadgets and applications, and it won't care if I don't log in for weeks at a time. We've come a long way. We've been through a lot. It's okay now.

I'm curious: what do you all think of Facebook? Do you have a profile? Do you use it often? Are you addicted? Do you hate it? Do you boycott? Do you think less of those who use it?

This social phenomenon (which I truly believe it is) fascinates me.



. . . . . And don't even get me started on MySpace.