Words: Adrian Wright

"Isn’t it crazy that we can chat to 400 people online all the time, but we can’t even take out 5 minutes to speak a decent sentence to our parents or our siblings or any other member of our families?"



Our generation is an online generation. In the good old days kids would play with mud and sticks, soccer balls and bicycles all in the great outdoors. Today all we need is a Mac, a PSP, an iPod, an HD {mosgoogle right} Flat Screen, a PVR, two cell phones with built in cameras and walkmans, Mxit, HSDPA (or airport), a GPS, a PS3 or Xbox 360, and enough rechargeable batteries to power Tokyo for three millennia. The long term effects of this kind of living are unknown. By 2050 we might all have fried brains and dim eyes due to the unlimited exposure to cell phone rays and TV screens. But blind comatose elders aside, we need to think about the effects that this e-life is having on us today.

Remember the first time you logged onto MySpace? It was a beautiful day. Birds were singing, crickets were cricketing, the sun was smiling in the sky, and the wireless internet was flowing like a cool breeze on a summer afternoon. Just about then a whole new world opened up to you, your dreams came true, life made sense, and you sat a little closer to the screen as you clicked ‘SIGN UP!’

What followed can only be described as a mixture between eating ice cream on the beach and winning a popularity contest. You upload your photos, describe yourself in the ‘about me’ section, list your interests, hobbies, heroes, you write your first blog about something really random while you scan profiles and add friends. For the first three days after signing up you beg your siblings to bring you food and you call your mum to buy you a bedpan because there is absolutely no way that you’re going to miss a single comment coming in. You now have roughly 40 friends and your profile pic makes you look like a Greek god/ goddess.

Some time later you heard people speaking about this new online phenomena known as Facebook. I must admit the first time I heard the name ‘Facebook’, I thought it was pretty dorky. I chose to rebel against such dorky MySpace wannabes. But after a friend emailed me from England telling me to join so he could chat to me I decided to give it a try. Same basic story minus the cool profiles plus some cool applications and better groups and you have your own book with a face. Once I discovered the groups, specifically those that included people from my high school, church and university, I was transformed into a ‘Facebook zombie’ (and that’s before they wrote the application about zombies biting chumps). I added all the friends I had lost contact with and started chatting to people I never thought I would see again. Since then I have joined groups such as, ‘We were born in 1984 and therefore we are better than you’,  ‘Friends’ of No Bob’, ‘Rugby – the game played in heaven’ and ‘Truth Mag – It Rocks.'

All this brings us to the question, which is better - MySpace or Facebook? I would say both have their pros and cons and both have the ability to turn you into an e-zombie in no time. But perhaps we shouldn’t be comparing MySpace to Facebook, because to be quite honest you could quite easily maintain both sites if you sat in front of your computer all day and all night. So perhaps we should be comparing MySpace and Facebook to the other things you can do with your time. I have found that this cyber-reality really isn’t that healthy when it becomes your only reality. What makes it so appealing is that you can escape the names friends used to call you at school and present yourself to the world in the way that you most wish for them to see you. You can create a new ‘identity’ and show people a little of who you really are and a lot of what you really want to be. You can add friends and the more friends you have (although you don’t even know the majority of them) the more popular and important you feel. But at the end of the day we lose sight of the reality all around us.