I have the textbook definition of a love-hate relationship with Facebook, as I’m sure many of my generation do. 

I like to have a good rant about the demise of society through Facebook and other such social networking sites, but I have to confess, I love the beast.

I love the feeling you get when you read status updates and realise that you are smarter, funnier and more interesting than your “friends”.

I love the ego boost you get when you have ten new notifications just for that day; nothing beats receiving comments on your own hilariously witty update, which of course is an in-joke involving only the closest of your Facebook comrades.

I have a pool of narcissism lurking within me that I like to dip my foot into occasionally (I can’t deny it, I am a blogger after all), but the question is, should I go for a  one kilometre swim every morning including warm-up laps?

I’d like to say I use Facebook for the greater good, to share news articles and interesting video clips (well, I do).

However, the majority of my time is spent laughing patronisingly at certain high school friends’ photos and immaturely sharing clips of a TV show from my childhood in which one character looks remarkably like a talking vagina (the program was Plasmo if you were wondering).

This is all a lot of fun, but when this kind of fun takes over my life and I can’t function for an hour without checking for status updates, something is not quite right. 

Facebook has shown me how banal life can be, how little people have to say and how much spare time they have to do it in.

I think we need some mystery.

As Jerry Seinfeld said, we need to give people a chance to miss us a little.

Perhaps we should all jump out of that nasty pool and take a walk, read a book, listen to some music or have a beer.

When we use Facebook , maybe we could use it as a means to comment on what interests us in the world, apart from ourselves.

I’m sure there must be something, right?

Liz Greenbank is a final-year Journalism student at La Trobe University.  More of Liz’s work can be found on her blog, at http://thewanderingscientist.wordpress.com/.

What do you think?  Are you obsessed with Facebook?   Or is it not as interesting as what others make it out to be?

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