A Look At The Millennial Generation And Facebook: "It Isn't Official Until It Is Facebook Official"

By Stephanie Vera on March 13, 2013


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It isn’t official until it is Facebook official.”

We are all guilty of hearing those nine words. Some of us are guilty of saying them.  Why do we do this? Why does it matter whether people are “Facebook official” or not?

Becoming “Facebook official” has added yet another step in the commitment ladder for many young people today.  If you are not “In A Relationship” on Facebook with your boyfriend or girlfriend, people will assume your relationship is not very serious. It becomes serious once you decide to announce your relationship status on Facebook to all your 1,000+ Facebook friends.  Whereas previous generations kept their relationship lives private, Facebook has made it easy for the millennial generation to post about their private lives on a public domain.

Who had become “Facebook Official” was the least of my worries as I traveled through Europe though.  I was abroad for three weeks and sadly the biggest cultural shock I faced was not from the hostels, the language barrier, or the food—my biggest cultural shock came from not having internet at my iPhone’s disposal, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  During those three weeks, restaurants with free Wi-Fi were akin to sanctuaries and my eyes were fixated on my iPhone screen when I found one of these “sanctuaries.”  Having Wi-Fi became Heaven. Facebook became my Bible. Mark Zuckerburg became my temporary God.  The Italians probably thought I was nuts, but my fellow American comrades would understand.

A young, American traveler from the millennial generation is all the Italians passing by would see. But in all honesty, I was just trying to share my experience with my friends and family back home.  I have grown up during the social media revolution. I had Neopet, Formsprng, MySpace and Hi5 accounts once upon a time.  Now I have graduated from the undergrad of social media and LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook consume my social media spheres.  All the while though, I think I have slowly lost sight of my experiences by putting them on Facebook.

Currently it is just a few hours in Europe, a few minutes at a dinner party, a few seconds at a concert, but what will those numbers look like in 5, 10, 20 years?  What will those numbers add up to in my life alone? Ben Parr found that on average people spend 8 hours per month on Facebook–I think this is a very conservative average.  Nevertheless, that is an 84 hour Friends Marathon, 4 hour Super Bowl, and 6 hours of sleep you are missing out on due to Facebook.

I no longer want Facebook to distract me from real-time interactions with people.  I regret wasting some of my precious Eurotrip2012 time posting about my experience rather than actually experiencing it.  The New Yorker columnist, Thomas Bellar, shares my thoughts with respect to this regard, stating in a recent article titled Saying Goodbye to Now,

“I am guilty of all the smartphone sins—in essence, staring at the phone when you should be staring at life… Am I deceiving myself? Because if you are taking a picture of your children, which is to say if you are holding a camera (in the form of a phone) and snapping a picture, then are you, in that moment, looking at them? Or are you anticipating a moment in the future—it is sometimes ten seconds in the future but it could well be ten years—when you will be looking at this very moment?”

Similar to Bellar, I am guilty of being preoccupied with getting the “perfect picture,” that I forget to just appreciate the beauty around me.  Ultimately Facebook is a tool and we have a choice to use that tool however we like.  We can choose to publicize what should be kept private on Facebook.  We can choose to question anything not Facebook official.  We can choose to let Facebook distract us from our real-time interactions. We can choose whether we even want to use Facebook at all.

Why Facebook has stuck around longer than its predecessor, MySpace, is beyond me.  Will the end to Facebook ever exist though? Chances are people will just keep arguing, “It isn’t official until it is Facebook official.”

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