Deliver us from Facebook, amen

December 11, 2008 by imakando musho ·
Filed under: Family, Friendship, Community, I was just thinking

I have nothing against social network sites having been on MySpace for close to a year now but I have always had this thing for Facebook. To say I hated it would be an understatement; I loathed it perhaps more than I hate AIDS. The dislike went on to the extent that I would give everyone who was on the network a long good lecture. Whether it was too my disadvantage or not I dont know, but soon everyone got the hang of it and stopped telling me they were on facebook. Can you believe that even my best friend hid it from me for two years?

Whenever I surfed the net, I would make sure that the site was nowhere near my URL address bar and I would groan and moan especially in internet cafes where every Tom and Dick would be logged on. You know, its as irritating as walking out of your house with a confident gait in your new Guccis, Prada and Armani only to find that everyone is putting on the same thing. Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t Facebook supposed to be used by people of a certain social standing who are in a certain age group? What then happens if a granddad is the number one user?

I am still a young man with lots of sex drive and part of the fascination for me is going to the ends of the earth just to get a girl I like so recently when a friend told me that a girl I was trying to get was on Facebook, I didn’t hesitate to register for the site and as they say, the rest is history.

In about six hours I had made ‘friends’ with a couple of friends accross the globe. Surprisingly non of them asked me how I had joined the utility and what I wanted. I think their shock equalled that of the early Christians when they found out that Paul their worst persecutor had converted to their faith. I wish some one had told me that the Facebook craze had gone as far as sucking every celebrity even the world class see on TV. Pastor, aren’t you suppossed to be watching Joyce Meyer in preperation for tommorrow’s sermon?

Ever since my first experience, I have been hooked. I talk, eat, sleep and talk Facebook. Every time my brain would be thinking, ‘Did 50cent accept my friendship offer? What has been Georgina upto? Why hasn’t Grace accepted me as her friend?’ and so on. And yes you have guessed right, my grades have dropped, my social life skills have tumbled and all the productive things that I used to do have been eroded.

Although the prayer that I made when the friendship offers started coming was, ‘Let yor kingdom come on Facebook as it is in heaven.’ , today I make a totally different prayer; ‘Deliver us from face book, amen.’ Maybe God should send another messiah whose specific mandate will be to deliver people from Facebook. I mean, that would make Jesus’ work alittle easier for him because he will be concerntrating on people with real sins not the ones that Facebook users commit.

The first Facebook sin is lying. I haven’t seen anyone with bad photos eversince and I must say eveyone on Facebook looks really cute although some of them are uglier than hell in real life. Someone else wrote on their profile that they were in Malaysia when in actual fact they were roaming the streets of Harare. It seems like its an unwritten rule amongst Zimbabwean Facebook users that if one is out of the country and has white friends, then they are as cool as it can ever get. Tell me what does this do to the ego of the nation?

The second and most serious Facebook sin is it renders you helpless. Yuo lose all your real life capabilities and you somewhat become a vegetable. For example, I personally like to write for the two blogs that I run, sharing songs with other bands on MySpace and strategizing how the family business can grow yet when I joined Facebook, all that went away and every one was asking me why I had lost touch. If this is happening to me who only has five hours of internet a day, what happens to the kid who has a laptop with 24hr internet access in his bedroom?

Facebook is a lion dressed in sheeps clothing. It sneaks upto you innocently and when you accept it, it renders you helpless. It is producing weaklings cyber strengths who are real life weaklings. The problem with Facebook is unlike MySpace there is nothing productive on facebook except chatting with friends worldwide and nothing more than that. What production comes out of chatting with family and friend s who are all over the world?

But all said and done, Facebook is as cool as as ever. Imagine befriending Beyonce, Cece Winans and all those populer people, people you would never have been friends with in real life. What can be cool as finding long lost friends and starting over from where you left? What can be as cool as staying in Malaysia and any other country you choose when in actual fact you are with us here in beloved Zimbabwe, being beautiful when in real life you are uglier than Brenda Fassie? We all like creating our ideal worlds and thats what the social site does.

Does any one remember Brokeback Mountain that gay movie and how it was bootlegged in the hood yet the same peole who attacked went on to watch it and made it into a Box Office monster? The same applies with the social network utility; hate it or love it, Facebook is here to stay and I dont foresee myself leaving the site anytime soon. All I am wondering is how the dummy who developed it thought about it, it could have been me with all that money.

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