I Hate It

Recently on Facebook I've noticed a bunch of statuses like “ I like it on the kitchen table”. Wondering what these statuses were about, I asked a few friends until I finally got an answer. It was in response to the question “Where do you like to leave your handbag when you get home?”. When I asked a few friends who had made it their status if they knew why they were responding to that question or where it came from, they had no clue.

Eventually, I did my own research and found out that it was a movement started to raise breast cancer awareness. Great cause , except one problem. If no one participating even knows what the cause is about, how exactly does it help raise awareness? Most people are only making it their status because they can’t dare be out of the loop.

I have said this before and I will likely say it again, that taking action on Facebook for a cause rarely accomplishes anything. All it really accomplishes is giving you a false sense of accomplishment. Joining one of those groups where they say they will donate x amount of money for everyone who joins is 99 % of the time totally bogus.

In general, I’m fascinated by how blindly people follow trends these days. It makes me worried that if the wrong thing were to become trendy, suddenly people could be supporting causes that  have bad consequences. I am not saying I am guilt free of this need to be trendy, because I was morbidly curious myself as to why this was so many peoples' facebook statuses.

Maybe it’s because I recently saw the movie The Social Network (which was amazing by the way), but the powers of social networking on the internet never cease to amaze me. Our generation updates each other about what we ate for breakfast via tweet (who cares if I had Fruit Loops for breakfast), what we did last weekend with pictures on facebook, and just about every detail you could want to know (or not know) about a person’s life. We all feel the need to constantly share our thoughts, which I realize I am just propagating by having a blog...but sue me.

Basically my recommendation is we should start putting more thought into these things, instead of just following the trends. But then I doubt that will ever happen, so in the meantime I will be looking to apply for a job at a social networking site. The matrix is slowly becoming a reality, our lives slowly becoming dictated by computers. I know, the former computer nerd (or current depending on how you look at it) is making this comment on his blog, but we already covered the fact that I’m hypocritical.