Dear Mark,

It took more than pain, courage or determination, but frustrations at everyday happenings for me to eventually swallow my pride and sacrifice my souciant time to pen this few lines. Like I always feel, we are both heroes and achievers in our chosen fields. Yet, I couldn’t but appreciate your effort in turning this world into a global village (like they call it) and thereby enlightening almost everybody inclusive of youths, adults, kidult, poor, rich, corporate bodies, celebrities, educated and illiterate to be, in some way, aware of the world “Internet” through your social web community “FACEBOOK”. Well-done!!!

Facebook, to me, is one of the best thoughts and one of the greatest inventions of all time, because at my own comfort, I can connect and share whatsoever I like with friends and foes all around the globe. Kudos once again. Through it all, I fear for this generation and I fear for the one to come, because social web community such as this, are highly addictive and if not properly controlled can take over someone’s life reflexively. For example, I’ve heard stories about people in Europe and America, putting their wedding ceremonies and other occasions on hold just to update their status. I read about a lady in India, who was crushed to death by a moving train while zealously reading joke on Facebook. These and lots more are what we experience each day to the extent that some people claimed that Facebook is anti-Christ, some said it’s a CIA’s gizmo for monitoring our daily lives, others said Mr. Devil himself invented it, no matter what it may be……Who cares?

Facebook, in its own way, has its own advantage(s). Like a friend wrote some times ago that Facebook has made life easy for people, especially stingy motherf**kers, who instead of calling or texting on your birthday, will prefer writing “Happy Birthday” on your Facebook wall, so incase you didn’t receive any call or text messages on your birthday, don’t contemplate suicide, simply log-in to Facebook and check you wall.

My apprehension about this whole Facebook conundrum is mostly about the status update I see each passing day. Some people have turned Facebook to a Media House, where all missing items are declared wanted with status updates like “I can’t find my period”. Some has turned Facebook to a religious network where self-acclaimed preachers force-feed us with prayer points, bible verses & quotations, citations from the Holy Quran, songs of praises and various quotable quotes from renowned individuals. Some of them, whom we all know on Planet Earth to be nobody or close to nothing, come up here to form Gangsters, Bad boys and Celebrities. These particular set of people will go to any length just to frustrate you with status updates like “I’m taking alcoholic shawarma”, “I love salad only when it’s hot”, “This pepper-soup is peppery” and stuffs like that. I know quite a lot of people, who instead of dedicating the limited time they have at their disposal to read or prepare for their Tests, Examinations, Interviews or whatsoever they need to do, come to Facebook to bore us with their lamentable status updates like “God help me, I have …… tomorrow and I haven’t prepare”.

To show how high the addiction level in some people are, after updating their status at 11:59PM with “Good Night Facebook”, they will update their status again at 12:01AM with “Good Morning Facebook”. Some dummies come up here to trade words with people they are scared to face one-on-one in the real world. Some uncultured, uncivilized individuals don’t just write bullshit(s) as comments; they go as far as commenting on other people’s comment uninvited. Some people due to computer error (their excuse) always attempt to blow our brains out with grammatical blunders and off-point comments. To these set of people, if they find it hard to express themselves in the Lingua franca, why can’t they save our souls by using their mother tongues?

Aside status updates, Facebook itself is causing more harm than good with some unnecessary announcements. At least, thirty times a day, I read stuffs like “OBJ is now friends with ATK and 3,334 other people”, “GEJ and 2,944 others changed their profile pictures”, “ATK like ‘PDP duped me’ and 419 other pages”, “OBJ wrote ‘I dey laugh’ on ATK’s wall”, “Sambo was tagged in GEJ’s Album ‘Na we get presidency come April 2011”, “IBB and 2,289 others like “ATK got served”. These and many more notifications flood our home pages every now and then.

In my own perspective, the problem of status update can be eradicated by changing the default question “What is on your mind?” to “Say something……No matter how meaningless”. Amendment should also be made to the “Write a comment” by changing it to “Write anything……Rubbish is allowed” and while all these is done, “UNLIKE” and “HATE” buttons should be made available to ease the stress of commenting on incessant, unremitting and inevitable bullshit(s) and instead of “Poke” put “Slap”.

I’m quite sure you will put all my suggestions into consideration.

Your Role Model,

Ayodeji Lancaster

N.B: Names used in the letter are fictional.

Ayodeji Lancaster ©2011