A recent episode of South Park called “ You have 0 friends” parodies facebook and draws attention the problems with it. This episode highlights some of the key issues with our obsession and overreliance on facebook. It exemplifies these issues in an exaggerated and often comical way, but effectively communicates what the issues really are.
The first is that people incorrectly assume things about real life based on what they see on facebook. For example when Stan’s friends create a facebook for him , he hardly uses it at first and doesn’t update his profile or relationship status and his girlfriend Wendy verbally attacks him for not putting himself in a facebook relationship with her, and jumps to the conclusion that he must be using facebook to meet other girls. The second issue is that when you view people’s messages on facebook you may misinterpret them because you do not have the same contextual information that you would get from talking to someone in real life, like their tone of voice or even what they look like. For example Wendy see’s a comment on Stan’s profile that says that he looks cute in his bunny costume and gets mad at Stan. What she does not realize is that the comment was left by one of his grandma’s friends who is probably just an old woman commenting about an old bunny Halloween costume that Stan wore when he was little. The third issue is that people define themselves by their virtual friendships and become obsessed with their number of facebook friends. For example in the show people gets so concerned with their number of facebook friends that Cartman starts a show about how to get more facebook friends and who facebook users should and shouldn’t be facebook friends with. The fourth issue is that people stop seeing the difference between real (romantic and non romantic) relationships and facebook relationships. For example a kid names Kip who becomes facebook friends with Kyle believes they are best friends because Kyle is his only facebook friend.
I think the South Park episode brought attention to some important issues with facebook obsession and overreliance and I hope that by watching it, some people may start to realize how facebook overreliance may be causing them problems, and take steps to improve the situation.
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This episode was hilarious...because it was completely true! People are so into their Facebooks and farming or whatever it is. I have a friend who is now a stay-at-home mom and I'm pretty sure that everything in the home is ignored except the computer because she is contstanly updating her farm or whatever. I'm not really sure how that works. Does anyone ever leave Facebook at home for the day. People are constantly connected. It's a little frightening. This episode definitely highlighted the craziness of Facebook. Especially with the whole relationship status thing and flirty comments from grandma. I try to stay away from Facebook. I hope our generation can take a step back from this whole social media craze.
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