BAZA ZNANJA

Kurs: --- English - Upper-Intermediate

Modul: Modals

Autor: prof. Gordana Matorkić

Naziv jedinice: Facebook Addict

Are you addicted to Facebook? What are the symptoms? Well, everything starts of with a simple exploration of your friends on the site and suddenly you are logging on more than ten times a day to see if any of your friends have made updates to their profiles, changed their relationship status or have posted new videos, articles, pictures. Suddenly, you are glued to your computer monitor and the only thing you see is Facebook. Yes, you are an addict and you should quit using it.

Firstly, you should admit to yourself you have a problem and ask yourself what you had accomplished by checking Facebook. Odds are, you would log to check for updates of when your friends changed their profile, but those might be the little things that keep you on a very short leash. In one moment you would probably realize how much time you spent getting nothing constructive done.

You must define your goals on Facebook. Whatever your goals might be, make sure that you devote time there to accomplish those goals.

Make and follow Facebook schedule. After each goal, mentioned above, you should write down how much time and what frequency you'll need to be on Facebook to achieve that goal. Write down the total number of hours per week you should be spending on Facebook,if it seems too much, adjust your activities accordingly. Try to think of other things you could be doing with your time spent on Facebook. You had a REAL life before Facebook had been created?!If you spend 15 hours a week on Facebook, try to find other things you could accomplish in that time, for example get fit, get a girlfriend/boyfriend, clean your house, read a book.

And finally, if nothing of these works leave Facebook! If you have created a schedule and couldn't stick to it, you have to deactivate your account and delete it.

You must find a Facebook substitute. A lot of people get addicted because they check it when there's nothing else to do, like in between classes, during a lunch break, then the curiosity spills over into time that should be spent doing other things, like studying or working. Call your friends or do something fun with them in person. If you're at a computer during critical times, find another website to log onto. Be careful, you may become addicted to that instead, so try to learn a word of the day, sharpen your mental skills by solving Sudoku.  Stop using facebook mobile to update your status. Uninstall it from your phone if you have a downloaded version.

Do you sometimes ask yourself: Could my excessive time and over-sharing on Facebook get me in trouble in my career? The percentage of companies firing employees for using facebook while working has doubled from 4 percent in 2008 to 8 percent in 2009. Don't think your boss won't find out. Many companies track their workers' Internet use. And even if they don't, your hidden use could catch up to you in the form of poor performance evaluations or even a pink slip. Your online life can easily start affecting you offline.

The study has shown that many slightly solitary persons become somebody else on the internet. One of addicted users said : "For the first time in my life I felt like I had a fan base, an audience and status updates became an important way for me to communicate to others the way in which I experienced the world. My friends were listening to me, reading my status updates and leaving comments- and this feeling of being known or heard or seen filled me with the illusory sense that I was unique, maybe even slightly famous". But, soon those people realize the "online" friends are not the real ones, and the loneliness simply changed its form and moved to a different place. Loneliness is one of the greatest symptoms of our new social networking world. Communities like Facebook create a false sense of friendship and belonging. Communicating becomes reduced to status updates or brief cutouts of personal information. But human beings are complex organisms with multiple layers.

At the end there is only one thing left to say: Delete the Facebook and face life!

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