Facebook Got Your Tongue?
“Time is Money” is a phrase we’ve all heard touted about to increase efficiency. Although undergraduate students may be more familiar with this maxim, “Efficiency = More Sleep,” in either case the point is the same. Efficiency runs our lives.
How much is too much? When does the pursuit of efficiency affect our lives negatively? While walking through the library sometime, take a look into the MicroGarden (And the new MicroCafe). Do you see many busy and industrious students hard at work? Possibly. Though when I walked in earlier I found that no fewer than half were engaged in the popular social networking site Facebook.
We’ve become socially efficient. As the number of your “friends” grow, are you more social or has Facebook got your tongue? There are many that praise this new highly literate society that has more communications over the spread of the world than at any time in our history. But what do we mean by communicate?
Out of 500 friends, how many do you talk to on a daily basis? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly? Ever? The operative word in this question is “talk.” Facebook has turned us into a egocentric society. “I updated my status, I wonder if anyone read it?” This doesn’t account for the extremely personal information released on Facebook. Things that should be kept to oneself. Though we’ve become an increasingly communicative culture, does that mean we have anything to say? Not particularly. Most status updates deal with trivialities of life, to mention nothing about Twitter. “I got up.” or “Supper sucks.” are typical.
So how efficient does Facebook make us in our studies? I believe we’ve regressed in that aspect. The average American’s time on Facebook increased 700% in the past year. (1) This means, of course, that there will be a deficient somewhere, can you guess?
Though Math Scores have risen slightly, in this increasingly literate culture verbal scores have dropped 30 points, and writing shows a downward trend. There are of course many factors that play into SAT Scores, but the the point is: As the use of Facebook and other language applications such as texting increases, should our scores in verbal and writing rise?
The next time you log onto Facebook, remember that there’s other stuff to be done.
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