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Facebook: Step Away
After a hard day tending to your farm, making sure the restaurant is still running, ensuring that your 76 pets are all fed and watered and then checking up on all of your fellow Mafia contacts, it must be hard to find the time to do anything else, right? But that if all of these task can be completed within a mere ten minutes, without even leaving the house or even the arm chair? In this scenario you are not a billionaire playboy designating tasks to your willing minions, you are simply one of the millions of people that go through the effort of switching the computer on and logging into Facebook.
The social network site was created in 2004 by college student Mark Zuckerberg and is now the most popular social network site in the world with over 500 million users. What started off as a way for people to re-connect and stay in touch has developed into a digital world with hundreds of games and applications that range from fantasy to mundane reality. Once logging into Facebook it is hard not to be pulled in to the many different groups, causes and games that users play, with invitations begging you to join your work mate’s vampire clan arriving almost daily it will soon start to lose the novelty factor.
The dedication of some users to these applications is astounding; some will post status after status claiming to de desperate for that last piece of wood to finish their barn with as much conviction as a child begging for a Christmas present. Users will spend their holidays or weekends religiously checking that their crops are tended to or that they have received the right amount of gold coins for a transaction in their mafia game. For a program that started as a way for people to communicate it seems that the lure of these games are pulling users further into their own fantasy worlds.
Perhaps it’s time to step away from the applications and start seeing Facebook for what it actually is, a platform for people to interact and rekindle lost friendships. This is not to suggest that users should abandon the site completely, just simply step away from the make believe worlds and start hanging out with friends that are not connected the mob.