By Robert Amoroso

Last week was one of those rare moments when I decided to confront my growing addiction and finally deactivated my Facebook account, however as addictions go, this one proved relatively easy. Perhaps it was my annoyance at the continued revamping and endless “tweaking”, of this social website, by those faceless webmasters, that finally brought to a head my dissatisfaction.

More likely then not, it was more of a generational issue then anything else, and the endless “tweaking” was merely the excuse I needed, which finally freed me of this seductive and self-indulgent form of entertainment, much like a TV reality show where abnormal, self-absorbed, social misfits, become celebrities.

Facebook had indeed become an endless stream of self-indulged strangers vying for attention from other self-indulged “strangers”, with an endless array of meaningless trivia that renders any type of meaningful interaction almost hopeless.

The irony of course is not all of those “friends” on Facebook are strangers some are actual family and friends, that I’ve known for years, that have suddenly developed a new persona, with a daily stream of photos, drama, and storytelling, so much so that at times I questioned whether the people I’ve known personally for years, were actually those portraying themselves on Facebook or not.

And I found myself entrapped in the same mindless pursuit, of posting photos of myself at various stages of my life, and inventing new and interesting plots, and humbly bragging to strangers of my new found persona, and ecstatic at receiving a “thumbs-up” sign from those same strangers.

Ironically I found myself being annoyed and resentful at those I knew personally simply because they created a character for themselves, and I reasoned they were being dishonest, and portraying themselves, as something else, or perhaps they were simply hoping that is how they’d like to be thought of. 

Whatever the reasoning I found myself questioning the very essence of this new found technology, and fortunately for me this “brave new world”, wasn’t a part of my culture, I grew up at a time when black and white TV was the emerging new technology of the day and so moving away from this seductive mistress, called Facebook, wasn’t at all a difficult choice.

However, I suspect at some point I may once again reinstate my account, however this time I’ll be the master of my faith, and not allow this temptress to dominate my life.

However, what of this new generation of enlighten geeks, with their iphones, blackberries, PC’s and tablets…what of they? Has their addiction to technology become so overwhelming, that they cannot disconnect for even a moment…and has social media changed forever the course of human physical interaction?