Lost and Found in Cyber Space

The other day I saw an advert with a clock that had the logos of big internet companies instead of numbers... a bit like this one:


And looking at it, I realised (once again) a sad fact: I am getting old(er)!

A high school kid could probably identify these logos in the middle of the night (but might on the other hand struggle to read the washing instructions on a t-shirt), but I could hardly identify half of them. I guess I have to accept that I am no longer part of the young generation that adapts to new technologies over night!

But while I severely doubt that many of these social media sites are worth my time anyway, I have to admit that I do find one of them really rather useful: Good old Facebook!

Having left Germany to study in England and England to work in South Africa means that it’s not always easy to stay in touch with friends. Phone dates must be scheduled a week in advance, personal e-mails can take a long time, and SMS are expensive and inefficient. So Facebook is a nice and easy way to keep in contact, share photos or just say “Hello, I am listening to a song that made me think of you”.

But despite seeing its value, Facebook – let’s not fool ourselves – can be a gigantic waste of time!

Rather than stay in touch with people we like, Facebook is all too often used to stalk people we’re not friends with and also don’t want to be friends with. That weird kid from primary school, the nerd from Uni or the nasty colleague from our last job; we don’t like these people or (God beware) want anything to do with them. Yet for some strange reason we find ourselves spying on them on Facebook and wasting time checking out what’s been happening in their life. And who hasn’t - after an undefined period of time - suddenly switched their brains on and realised they were looking at the 748th photo of a person they didn’t know, had no friends in common with and couldn’t for the sake of it remember how they got on to their page in the first place.

And how often have you met up with a real friend in real life and found that she was reaching for her phone to respond to a text / BBM / Facebook message? So rather than talk to the person she had chosen to meet, she was texting someone she had chosen not to meet!

To my utter horror I realised the other day that nowadays people don’t just spend more time talking to each other on Facebook than in real life. No, they actually choose to communicate through Facebook even if it would be easier to simply talk to each other:


My mother (at our home in Germany) asked my baby sister (in Cape Town) to tell my other sister (also at our home in Germany!) to give her some documents to copy!

Good grief!

What is Facebook doing to my family? With already more than one computer per person, I am concerned that they might soon stop interacting with each other in real life all together!

So in a sense, I guess there is at least one good thing about my baby sister going back to Germany: My family can communicate via Facebook from one bedroom via the office to another bedroom and won’t have to send messages all around the globe anymore to exchange information!