Abbey Oster
Mr. Jennings
Honors English III
November 7, 2011
Keep it Old School
Picture this. You live in a world where talking is totally old school. No one feels the need to talk; I mean why talk when you can just type everything out? Everyone has cute little farms, but the farms can’t actually do anything for you. Literally, nothing can ever be done without going on your phone or computer to check who else is online. School is gone because kids weren’t doing anything anyways. They were all too involved with who was facebook official and who could get the most “likes” for their “truth is…” status. No one goes anywhere. No one has face-to-face conversations. No one lives in the real world. The real world doesn’t exist anymore. Facebook is the world everyone lives in nowadays. Okay, maybe that was a little extreme, but Facebook has made a turn for the worst. It has gotten too big too fast. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should eliminate Facebook all together. I’m just saying that Mark Zuckerberg needs to stop “improving” the network and bring it back to the good old days.
Whatever happened to the purpose of Facebook being to reconnect with your old friends and talk to your current ones? In October of 2009, New York Times had an article about Farmville. Farmville is a major problem for Facebook. The article, To Harvest Squash, Click Here, stated that, “More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since it made its debut in June…” Their source was the creator itself, Zynga. five months that’s it. It only took five months to become obnoxiously popular. Of that 62 million people, 22 million sign on every day. And this was only five months after the awful debut.
A professor at Syracuse University, Robert Thompson said for the article, “Just like Guitar Hero lets you feel a little like being a rock star — you get to pose and dance a little while you’re doing it — with FarmVille there is a real sense that you’re actually doing something that has a cause and effect. The method of dragging food out of the ground and getting something for it is really satisfying.” How can games like this really be satisfying? What are you actually getting out of harvesting your blueberries? Farmville or any other game on Facebook for that matter has taken away the point of Facebook. Facebook is a social network designed to stay connected with friends. How can you stay connected with your friends if you are too busy taking care of your “farm”?
I can’t do anything without Facebook. Facebook is just a huge distraction now. Not just a distraction, it’s more like an addiction. I would say I check Facebook at least fifty times a day. For no reason, other than there is nothing else to do. It is my go-to place. If I can’t figure out a math problem; Facebook. If I can’t find the right words for my paper; Facebook. If I am around a lot of people I don’t know; Facebook. When I open my phone up my fingers go straight to Facebook, even if I wanted to go somewhere else. You may say that it’s my choice to be on Facebook all the time, it is honestly an addiction. You can’t just expect the addict to stop; you have to take the drug away from the addict.
All the applications on Facebook now have put a damper on students’ grades. Trust me, I know from experience. There have been many nights where my homework didn’t get finished. Why would I want to work on my annoying homework when I could chat my friends, update my status, and stalk my friends’ profiles?
People turned to Facebook because they thought it was different than Myspace. It was true, Facebook was different at first. It was easier to connect to others and it was easier to keep up. There was no need to personalize profiles or come up with a cool username. Your user name was simply your name, and everyone had the same profile design. The homepage was all about your friends on Facebook where on Myspace it was all about you. There were way too many games and apps on Myspace. Facebook was strictly for socializing, which makes sense considering it is a SOCIAL network. Facebook was so cool compared to Myspace. Now Facebook is Myspace. People have gotten around using their normal names. There are more games than you can imagine on Facebook. Surprisingly you still can’t design your profile.
Thanks to Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, we can go back to the old ways of Facebook. Twitter took the essence of Facebook and made it into a new social network. Think about it. Twitter is all about your statuses and ‘following’ what your friends are up to. As long as Dorsey knows what he has right now, he will keep it the same.
Why fix what isn’t broken? Facebook was perfectly fine before all the gaming. Sometimes good ideas are better off untouched. There is no need to improve if you are already perfect. Facebook should go back to having no games and be strictly on the computer. Being able to getting to it anywhere is where all the problems start to occur.
Abby: Some good ideas here hiding in what seems like still an early draft. Check organization by identifying the main idea of each paragraph and checking to see if you have fully developed this, and only this, main idea. Clarify each par. main idea with your thesis. If lack of communication as mentioned in 1st par. is a problem but your overall thesis is that facebook should go back to being primarily a means of socializing, does this contradict? If the problem is access is too easy, how would getting rid of Farmville effect this? Etc. Once you’ve clarified your thesis, go back to sentence one and keep and develop all ideas related or relatable to the thesis and dump everything else. Kill off zombie words in the meantime—this will also force you to be more specific.