Confessions of a Facebookaholic

Hi, my name is Emily and I am a Facebookaholic. Phew, it feels good to get that off my chest, to out my dirty little secret . It is shameful to admit it but, alas, it is the truth. Facebook is the bane of all those who work from home for, with just the click of a mouse, a whole world is available to you. Sitting on your own in your study, your bedroom, your front room, or at the kitchen table, you can automatically be transported to a party to which all of your friends, both past and current, and from all over the globe, have been invited. You can see what they are up to, with photo evidence, at any time of the day or night. When you’re all alone at home, with no-one to talk to and no-one to glance over your shoulder and see what’s on your screen, the urge to type in that web address can often be too powerful to resist.

Although I have been signed up to Facebook for a few years now, back in England I would only occasionally log on to the site, perhaps when I had half an hour or so at the weekend to kill. That is, I suppose, partly due to the fact that most of my friends live in England and therefore if anything interesting happened I’d get a phone call, if there were any great photos to see I would be shown them in person. The main reason that my relationship with Facebook was as a casual acquaintance rather than a full-blown love affair whilst in the UK, however, is that I couldn’t access the site at work. Without being able to log on during the day, and not wanting to switch on my laptop at home after a full day in front of a computer screen, little time was available to check the statuses of long-lost friends.

Here, the first thing I do when I switch on my computer is check the BBC website for any important news that might have passed us by in Thailand, then my emails, and then Facebook. It has become part of the structure of my day. Facebook appeals to my passion for the details of other people’s lives. I, along with The Mother from whom I must have inherited it, am an avid people-watcher, and can miss whole conversations on my table in a restaurant by listening intently to the conversations on other tables. On Facebook, this often leads me to click through wedding albums of people I don’t even know. If a friend has been tagged in an album, I will have a look but then peruse the entire album. Sometimes, as I am looking at newlyweds , I have never even heard of in the church and at their reception, and people I have never met at a party or on holiday, I do have stop and ask myself what I’m doing. It is disconcerting to think about how much time I must have wasted looking at the photos of strangers and the statuses of people I don’t even care about.

I do have a single, but really rather good, excuse - that I am merely ensuring that I don’t lose touch with people whilst abroad and thousands of miles away from them. I really must stop attempting to keep up with the lives of total strangers though.