Sydney Life

A common affliction among University students, Facebook-itis ranks as the third most prevalent of student diseases behind none other than The Big Night and Procrastinator-Fever. In some journals it is in fact cross-listed with Procrasinator-Fever and to a larger extent, MySpace-Mania.

Facebook-itis can seem like a bit of harmless fun at first but can develop into a nasty addiction. It is a slow and painful killer of one’s study regime and academic marks. It is also unfortunately very contagious, especially amongst Generation-Y who all practically live through the internet.

I procrastinate a lot. I actually spend more time procrastinating than doing actual work. Sometimes I even procrastinate from procrastination (eg. going on Facebook instead of cleaning my room instead of studying).

So when I was introduced to the world of Facebook, my academic career was basically dead.

For those of you who don’t know, Facebook is an online social networking site, much like MySpace. However, from my superficial manoeuvrings around MySpace, I have come to the conclusion that its severe lack of attention to detail sees it coming a far second behind Facebook, the superior procrastination tool.

Last week, I came to the horrifying realisation that I actually spent more time playing* on Facebook than any single other activity, apart from sleep. I’m dead serious. This was obviously an extremely detrimental, not to mention SAD situation, so I decided to take a week off.

Cold turkey.

Not many of my friends believed I could actually do it. Some were not only unsupportive, but went in the complete other direction by spamming my wall/commenting on my photos/poking me ** and therefore increasing my email alert count, so that I may be lured back into the devilish arms of FB.

But! I actually did it. You better believe it, and you’d better be proud...

Funnily enough, I did go crawling back to MySpace for a bit, though as predicted I couldn’t procrastinate nearly as much on it. Furthermore, I’m quite certain I did more study that week than I’ve done all semester, and I definitely felt a lot healthier not being cramped behind my computer screen all day. Now, I actually don’t feel that awful tug to go on as often anymore, but it is a nice reward every now and then. Speaking of which...

Just kidding! Back to studying for a stats quiz for me. Seriously...

*playing on Facebook generally consists of stalking other people through the safety(!) of the world wide web.
**things you can do on Facebook.