Ernest Bazanye's Bad Idea: Facebook makes you stupid

The options are the same, and the result is the same. You will not be able to survive and your head will be destroyed.

 

For those of you not familiar with this facebook of which I speak, you survivors, let me explain it to you. I will not spare the gory details.

 

Facebook is a computer device created in the Tri-State Area by one Dr Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who originally called it the Mind-To-Mash-Reducinator before a PR firm was contracted to disguise its malice and its true intent.

Facebook is essentially a toy, but like all toys, after a while the game gets sour.  

 

Say How: First of all the numbers get bloated and you find that people you would get along perfectly with in real life become migraines beaming pain off the screen at you.

 

For example, krglfs. We call them krglfs because that is a term that seems to aptly describe a thing that makes no sense. A krglf is a person who types without vowels or who deliberately misspells words.

 

None of them seem to realise that people are looking at them the way we regard the chap who walks into a formal dinner meeting in a hotel and starts to eat with his fingers, chew with his mouth open and spit bones out onto the table.

 

If you are a krglf, you may think this is unduly harsh and unreasonable, but I kid you  not, this is actually what people think of you when they see your typing. I cannot help what people think.

 

What Else: But krglfs  can be ignored, or mocked, or kindly asked to repeat themselves in grown-folks' words, but there are other things.

 

Like having to spend 15 minutes untagging yourself from borderline pornographic photos kids stuck your name on overnight, and then having to uninvite yourself from high school dances and regional beauty pageants and planned slactivism protests about things you could not find a rat to give its bottoms up for, and then there is more time to spend removing yourself from groups like Uganda Adventist  Youth Against HIV, Farming For The Future,  The Truth About Illuminati, We Lav Chris Brown Breezy Funz N Ug Stund AP!

 

So after that half hour you finally get to actually play facebook. And that, believe it or not, is the worst part of the whole thing.

 

The Worst: Successfully facebooking, that is, chatting, liking, posting, inboxing, commenting, telling your friends to spell in English and stop writing as if their mouths are full of fish bones, actually has a demonstrable effect on your cognitive performance.

 

They are calling it Internet Attention Deficit Disorder and have found that it reduces your attention span, your concentration power, your memory... generally, your head. I know this is true because before facebook I was astoundingly brilliant. Now I am merely very very clever in certain contexts.

 

Offer Solutions: There are none. The best you can do for a strung junkie is tell them they have a problem and supply them with quality drugs.

 

We will not get off facebook, so we will all become dumber and the people who do not have internet access will take over the nation. Then we will tweet about it.