According to rapidly changing statistics, about 3.9 billion people or 81% of Americans use Facebook. Imagine that 3.9 billion people posting pictures of their cats and telling others where they are, what they are doing, what they are eating, and what kind of day they are having, or wish they were having.

It’s positively mind boggling isn’t it – not only the amount of time we while away, but the amount of useless information we generate. Where does it all go? Probably to a server somewhere in cyberspace that will not even save it after we took time to write it. Sometimes I think that the world could end, and no one would notice until someone posted about it on Facebook.

Reality is no longer real. Virtual reality is more actual than bona fide reality.

In the world of social media, we are known by the comments we LIKE. We can LIKE something without having to give a reason. You like it just because you like it. You don’t have to know why. No logic, no proof, no reasoning, and no supporting evidence – just because.

And if you really like it, you can click SHARE and let all your friends like it too. You can COMMENT if you really must, but if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. The only important thing is how many LIKES a post gets and how many times it is reposted.

Notice that LIKE has become a noun now. We get and give likes. What a world. My high school English teacher is probably better off dead because this would kill her.

We can FRIEND someone if we are interested in what they have to say. Friend is no longer a noun, it is now a verb. Words seem to be getting trickier than ever in the social media world of virtual reality. You can’t even trust parts of speech.

What did we do with our time before Facebook? Well, there were chat boards, emails, newsgroups, and bulletin boards. Remember? There still are, and numerous other social media sites, some also owned by Facebook, or Meta, as they now call themselves.

Business spends millions putting LIKE, SHARE and TWEET buttons on websites to get in on the action. 3.9 billion people can’t be wrong. That number of potential customers have them salivating on the screen.

When I went to my first computer class for Windows 95, (Yes – back in the Dark Ages) the instructor saved email training until last. We eventually found out why. As soon as people started sending email to each other, the class erupted in total chaos. People sent an email and jumped up to run to another computer to see if it arrived. There is something thrilling about electronic communication.

We can FRIEND everyone we know, everyone we have ever known, and everyone we expect to ever know. Does anyone actually have 5000 people they can call friends – other than on social media? Does anyone need 5000 friends reading about their life and likes? Don’t we have enough trivia in our lives to keep us busy without reading the mundane details of someone else’s life?

The answer is apparently “NO!” Would life go on if we didn’t know everything about everything?

Some people have refused to be seduced by social media. They insist on actually interacting face-to-face with each other. Imagine that! These people are technical dinosaurs. They will die off soon and become extinct. We can read about it on Facebook. Don’t worry. We are safe in our virtual world, staying in touch while being out of touch.

It’s a social media world, people. If you enjoyed this article, please LIKE it, better yet, COMMENT on it, and best of all, SHARE it so other people can LIKE it too.

Copyright 2012 Sheila Moss
Updated 2022