The black hole of time

May 2009 brought a welcome change to my life when I got rid of the TV. The outcome was so good I had to make another big change last month. I deactivated my facebook account. Yeah, that’s right. No more facebook, aka I don’t exist anymore.

I had fun while it lasted. Social networks are nice when it comes to keeping in touch with friends. But in the name of entertainment, there lies a slippery path of addiction. Status of friends. Like the status. Comments to those statuses. Like the comments. Status of the commenters. The list goes on. The distraction model is astonishingly successful. The red bubble for new comments is impossible to not click, even if that means I will end up partly re-reading the whole comment thread.

There is a bigger problem than this ginormous time sink mechanism. As the friend network grows, status updates become more trivial, since it is harder to write any serious or controversial thought for fear of offending a few good friends. Passivity here we come.

Twitter shall remain as my status update tool for it has yet to make unproductive use of my time. Somehow I find it more useful due to the high quality tweets I enjoy from a handpicked list of people.

I am sure facebook is the ultimate social tool for many, but if care is not taken, much of one’s time will be wasted without doubt. And time is much more precious than money.

Adios, Facebook.