Online Communities and Connection/Isolation

I, personally, have a lot of family that live all over the world in the U.S, Canada, Europe, Africa you name it. Therefore to keep in contact with them, social networking sites, Facebook in particular, are often the easiest form of communication. Especially at this point in my life, where I have so much going on with school, work, and trying to maintain my social life it does become difficult to make time to contact my family who live in other parts of the world. Moreover, Facebook is not the only form of communication I use to keep in contact with them. I call every now and then, text them, and fly out to see them whenever I am presented with the opportunity.

Back in high school, however, I’m not going to lie Facebook consumed about 85% of my time. I was addicted! I logged on numerous times a day, I was always updating my statuses, responding to my inboxes, and I had multiple chats opened, where very often I would be talking to almost twenty people at a time. It was quite out of control now that I think about it. I remember in some classes where we were allowed to use the computers, my friends would literally be sitting right beside me but we still felt the need to talk to one another through our Facebook messages. I think a large part of the reason why Facebook used to consume so much of my time was because I had so much extra time on my hands. I didn’t have a job, my homework wasn’t too time consuming, and as a result plenty of my extra time went into Facebook. Nonetheless, through limiting the amount of time I spent on Facebook and deactivating my account on several occasions, I can now truthfully say I am no longer addicted to Facebook. I’m actually starting to hate it! I rarely ever go on now and I just don’t care to put too much time into Facebook or any other social networking site I am a part of. Now, I feel as though if I truly care about the people I remain in contact with, I’ll go out of my way to making time for them in person, rather than communicating with them online. I really do believe that social networking sites isolate us from real world communication because I have experienced it in my personal life and I don’t want to be a part of that anymore so I choose to limit the amount of time I spend on them to prevent this from re-occurring.