Upload Girl, She's Been Living in an Upload World - Nikki Lorenzini

As I write this, I am logged onto Facebook. I check it in the morning before I go to work. I log on during my lunch break. I log on after work at least once. Depending if I am doing Facebook chat, I can be online anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour. I found my best friend from grade school and ended up deleting her. I had people who found me from grade school but I dont’t even remember them, and had mutual friends who tried to add me when I never met them. I immediately add people when I have just met them. It seems like everyone’s lives revolve around our Facebook accounts.

I remember when I first signed up for my account. That was approximately 6 years ago. (Yes, that long ago!) When I first logged on, I did it kind of hesitantly. I didn’t want to have one because I thought “everyone” had one. That makes me giggle now. At the time, it was only for college students, Facebook only allowed you to upload photos, and there was no chat and no applications. Facebook was the safe alternative to MySpace (remember MySpace?), which seemed always to be on the news for something along the lines of children being kidnapped.  

Now it seems that Facebook has taken over our lives. It’s on the news for its privacy settings (and when we have an oil leak that could take months to clean up). 7-11 is teaming up with Farmville, one of the more popular applications on Facebook, to promote a line of Slurpees. I heard a story about a person actually receiving a kidney transplant contact via their Facebook status update, another of people getting married after meeting on Facebook, and a father and son reconnecting on Facebook. I’ve heard of people getting fired over pictures and statuses that were posted. Companies have their fan pages to help spread word of store openings, and charitable organizations have pages to show where your money is going.  

I look back to a time before Facebook. Granted, I am only 27 years old, but I can still remember when the Internet was just starting to come into people’s homes. I remember my first AOL screen name. That was dial-up, now we have Verizon Fios. MySpace never existed, we just had creepy chat rooms where you talked to a 50-year-old pedophile without even realizing it. Sure, MySpace and Facebook are probably a step up. I just do not think that our Internet profiles really need all this attention. Are we really so bored that our lives revolve around Facebook? To get to it via on our phones, our TVs, and, oh yeah, our computers? I guess I’m not any better since I’m blogging about Facebook.

I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg thought that Facebook would be such a huge hit, that even the news would have report about privacy settings. I mean, is anything really private on the Internet?