Facebook is a cancer

When you register on facebook you don’t realize that your life is about to change. At first I tried to resist it pretending to be a real nonconformist but then, because of such an extraordinary diffusion, it attracted my attention, without my intention.

People don’t realize how damaging facebook is. Now it has become a dependency for me. Everytime I open my laptop the first word I type is ‘facebook’, and sometimes, or I should probably say most of the times, without realizing it.

Facebook, as the word says, is a book. However, it is a ‘special’ book mainly composed of pictures and posts apt to satisfy the grimmest narcisism, which restate the immediacy and superficiality of this platform.

I would like to use the word ‘superficiality’ in a neutral way, just as something related to the surface. However, the surface, in this case, is our face. Our face is at stake, at the mercy of gossips. We are deprived of our privacy and hollowed out from our individual spiritual richness.

Facebook becomes the filter of all our emotions and thoughts. We are unknownly the media of ourselves.  It insidiously corrodes our minds through its ‘mercuriality’ -thanks to its lack of physicality and therefore of shape and borders.

A click is sufficient to throw us into a virtual parlor, which makes us feel sorrounded by devoted friends. But these same friends, in an instant, can be transfigured in a cold and angular screen. Loneliness.

Everything is so fast on facebook, it goes with the same speed as our hectic lives. This velocity entails carelessness in writing, in reading, in drawing conclusions about other people’s beliefs and feelings. The verbal dispersion of facebook is precisely antithetical to the rigor and exactitude typical of writing.

We are constantly under the probing eye of a camera, like in the most sordid reality shows in which we are the protagonists.  Instead of using facebook these protagonists are used by it, in the same way as the philosophical train of existentialism described the phenomenon of alienation.

Human beings, instead of being the master of technology become its slaves, loosing their mental and physical control and, above all, their concentration. Facebook scans the rhythm of our days keeping us company from when we wake up until we go to bed.

Before having an account on facebook I used to read in bed prior to sleeping.  This is what scares me the most: facebook has substituted the real books.