Facebook, the ultimate social platform.

Facebook, a virtual meetingplace, a new market for products with the availability to surgically target their peers, a place to hang out. Facebook has over 500'000'000 users, that is, amazingly, about 7-8% of the world population. In other words, about 83% of the world's internet users. To compare this with something, it took the internet about fifty years to get 600'000'000 users, Facebook used six to get the 500 million. Wait, that's a bad comparison, remember: you can't compare Facebook. (That is not true, another extreme is Tesco, which has half a billion employees, but they don't exist in France, so it doesn't count)



Facebook is a 25 billion dollar industry, with about 1700 employees. And you thought that football is a industry of people who are immensely overpaid? Well, it is, but anyways. David Beckham earns about 80p a second, that is, exactly, 25'245'540 pounds and eighty cents, about 39'730'166 dollars; 0.1% of what Facebook is valued for. Facebook is one industry that actually shits money, literary; all the waste and crap produced by Facebook make money. This is the perfect image of total profiteering, it is the Mona Lisa, to use a figurative imagery, of our time. Though, what it really is: it is the Oidipus of our time, and soon it will be us that blind ourselves with the brooches of irony.

The irony? Well, the irony of sharing, the time use, the social interaction, the illusion. Facebook is built on irony. We, one of the millions on millions of teenagers who use Facebook, log on to this website, everyday, several times, to interact with other social human beings.

We share personal information so that friends and the cute girl from the party yesterday can easily find you, information that is stored for future use, information that is sold to third parties. Everytime you accept a new, cool application on Facebook they gain access on your information. I am not saying that Facebook is creating this database which they are going to use to take over the world, but I AM saying that we are entering a world of total surveillance, and it is spiraling out of control. And we accept this, we don't reconsider or even consider the implications this has on our life today, and tomorrow. Everything you say, every meaning you express, every thought and idea you share, is stored, categorized and used. Personal conversations over 'Facechat' is private in the context that your friends may not see the dirty conversations between you and your secret lover, but Facebook can, but why do you care? Facebook won't tell, will they?

We use hours, and hours every day, hours used to socialize with our friends online. And isn't that why Facebook was made? So we could gather all our friends in one place, so we didn't have to waste time on calling texting, MSNing all my different friends in order to plan a night out, or PJ party at my place next weekend. But wait, what? Facebook was created in order to save time? So tell me then, why do we spend more time on Facebook than we do with our friends? Why do we spend more time on Facebook than we do on School, Workout, Family? There is no such thing as free-time (there is barely a thing called sleep-time), there is only, Facebook-time.

So we use all of these hours online, talking to friends, planning the next weekend, saying yes to events that you will never really attend: we socialize. Socializing is not longer what the Webster dictionary say is "to participate actively in a social group". Socializing is to be, on Facebook.
We live in the illusion that our lives have become more socialized, more active. We believe that we have more gotten more friends, we feel that we have achieved a higher social status, and we love it. We love everything about Facebook, and that is why we will never quit using it. It is a industry of 500 million mindless zombies, posting witty quotes on their wall, responding to their friends 'less' witty quotes. It is a industry that you log on to to milk your cow, or kill your friend in a mafia war. It is the industry of the ultimate social interaction for our time, and the future. It is an industry that captures the attention of students and workers alike, creating a society slowly deteriorating into monotony, and we log into Facebook to escape from that monotony. And if you try to escape, Facebook adapts. It has adapted to several millions websites, it has adapted into Wikipedia, it has adapted into you pocket. There is only one thing that it has not yet adapted into, and hopefully never will. That is, China.

China is the smartest country in the world, it did something that no other country ever thought of, what every country should have done, and therefore saved the future for itself and its citizens: it blocked Facebook.