ASHLEY EVANS STAFF COLUMNIST
There is no easy way to say it: Facebook is out of control.
Not since nicotine has something sucked people in so fast.
Thirteen seconds after your first daily Newsfeed check, your brain is already hooked.
Throughout the day, new faces in the Mensa or relationship rumors trigger dopamine levels that crave a quick glance at status updates or new uploaded photos. It is more addicting than crack cocaine only without the side effects.
The medical condition is called “Facebook Fascinoma.”
Symptoms include compulsion to Facebook chat, OCD-like checking of all tagged pictures and an unhealthy knowledge of strangers’ information. The most common symptom is becoming increasingly creepy with more usage.
Further proof it exists lies in the Blackberry touch screen commercials, in which the latest phone is marketed with teasers of the phone’s ability to check Facebook in the palm of your hand. Sweet!
Now if the Vogel Library computers blow up, you won’t miss out on the 140,000 bumper stickers currently in existence.
I should quarantine myself, go cold turkey this term and suspend my account. (I tried once. It lasted three hours. They don’t make a patch yet, but the cappuccino-flavored gum is quite the determent.)
I don’t even like Facebook anymore, anyway. I can barely get on to stalk without some creep chatting me.
AIM went out of style in sixth grade; why is it trying to resurrect on my Facebook account?
I can take that over the incessant status updates of the break-up drama that occurs, however. I can barely deal with my own drama, let alone statuses that scream, “I hope that [profanity] is happy with her new guy after only three days. Those nine months weren’t worth it.”
Clearly! Thanks for letting the world know that, buddy. Maybe she left you cause you’re a freaking psycho and spend more time on the “book” than with her.
And what is the deal with people who have the audacity to put “It’s complicated with [insert name of complete idiot]?” Would it be less complicated if you didn’t tell 935 Facebook friends about it?
Here is another morsel of guidance: stop with the family pictures. No one wants to see your six aunts or your parents at Thanksgiving. Truly.
Even more annoying is the cropping of profile pictures that has continued to increase at an alarming rate.
After the initial shock of a new Halloween album every 12 seconds on Newsfeed, profile pictures were being changed with an 87 percent success rate of faulty cropping.
There should be a rule that you cannot crop your profile picture if your face is jammed next to someone else’s and/or if you leave his or her hair in the picture. Computer graphic design taught me nothing, but I still understand proper cropping etiquette.
As further proof of the denial of this rampant disease, some have begun to refer to stalking as “Facebook research.”
Right, because JSTOR would certainly include information about the girl in your stats class whose only interest is eating raw oatmeal.
How do we cure this? Join the tetherball intramural team? Maybe more kayaking lessons in “The W”? Or should we just accept that we will forever expect to know what someone is doing and want to know exactly what time they began doing it?
I guess I’ll just have to keep chewing the cappuccino gum until a patch is developed. Thanks Mark Zuckerberg!