The Brownbag

 by Mery Diaz

With  the era of Friendster, Myspace and Facebook we were introduced to a whole new and exiting way of interacting with one another. We regained the long lost friend from  Ms. Lee’s 4th grade class whom we would otherwise have never seen  again for the rest of our lives. We were able to keep up with all 500 hundred of our “friends” without  ever so much as calling them once in 2  years. Their pictures and updates tell us all we  need to know  about their 5th baby, their new plant, and checking out their new relationship that will last for all of 2 weeks. All good and fun we could say. However, with the convenience of  social networking comes great responsibility and  it quickly became apparent that people love to  abuse this power of instant gratification. And these same people just seem to love to “lose it! ” on facebook!

Mental meltdowns, “anger” issues,  and  axis 2 diagnosis of the personality disorder variety  just seem to shine brightly on the newsfeeds. Next time you are on facebook, and G-d help us following some tweeter action, notice how the updates range from the painfully mundane and entirely uninteresting comments “ I just ate cheerios and breathed” to the wise and deep thoughts by Jack Handy type “ seek and you shall find,  be kind rewind my friend”  to the more  colorfully dysfunctional type and my personal love-to-hate favorite “ my life is an abyss of nothingness, no one loves me  and  I will start breaking things if no one leaves a comment on my status”. For serious?!

If you are a culprit of “losing it” (because it may just happen to the best of us) you may reconsider status updates as the venue for said ”moments” in your life. If there are more than three of these ”moments” at any given time, Houston you have a problem. However,  If your newsfeed is the victim of numerous “losing it” friends, I suggest constantly updating your settings to reduce the amount  of  comments from the people who  are repeat offenders of ” Losing it”. Because if there ever was a greater invention set to feed into our narcissistic  traits, it is definitely social networking (note: not a substitute for therapy). It is a virtual playground for the attention seeking and not to mention those who love to peep, but  that’s whole other story.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at and is filed under Culture, Anti Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.