Facebook may be changing, but it's still the No. 1 time-waster

03/25/09 - A few days into Spring Break, I sat in a vibrantly colored food court at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, among strangers in seclusion, away from familiarity, away from Rhode Island.And to be true to Spring Break (and any type of vacation really) it's ideal to get away from work, school, and routine everyday reality. But I would find myself struggling in an epic battle with a relentless itch trying to get connected to the Internet for just a few minutes... in a sad, undying hope to check my No. 1 addiction: Facebook.

Though it seems pathetic to have been on the way to Los Angeles while still holding such desires of checking up on my virtual world, Facebook is certainly a maddening, fabled demon of social networking that has captured the souls of many. And while it wreaks havoc on the vows of productive time management, its usefulness is inescapable- but its vices are too.

I will not deny the power that notifications and friend requests hold over my feeble little attention span, but I will be proud to say that I use Facebook simply as a means of communication, and for the most part I leave its unnecessary functions out of my daily use.

But as Facebook seems to always be undergoing some kind of perpetual transformation, adding new trivial uses and functions, users also continue to find ways to make logging on more of a nuisance than a tool.

Not a moment too soon after the birth of the famous "25 Random Facts" note, a new trend unleashed its woe on the millions of users on Facebook. The newest strangulation of the Facebook everyman's lifeblood comes in the form of tagging friends in group pictures, categorizing and stereotyping them by some kind of character trait.

While I check my Facebook far more times a day than I'd like to admit, there's always a great allure when that little red notification box comes up on the bottom of the screen.

But when that notification box says "10," I reach a whole new level of nerdy giddiness... until I realize that I've merely been tagged in 10 more of those useless character pictures. Either that, or 10 more people have commented with a useless "lol" or "That's so true. I really am the annoying loud one."

I understand the initial entertainment value, but with the trend's sole purpose of exploiting someone's dominant character trait, what's the point? Sure we all do have principal traits, but being human, we're dynamic and carry a little bit of everything.

Without an obligation to tell anyone, our demeanors constantly change from happy to sad, outgoing to shy, pleasant to irritable, and so on.

Now I'm not an uptight nemesis of unproductive behavior. I'm all about wasting time if it's worth the effort, but the random picture tagging business isn't. Like the 25 Random Facts survey, the picture tagging is another step toward impersonalizing networking and it's somewhat degrading to be labeled as person with just one main characteristic.

Out of my particular group of friends, I might be considered to be the writer out of the group, but that doesn't mean I sleep, breathe, and eat grammar and Associated Press style all day long.

Sure, for all those fine folks that surrounded me in busy Chicago, seeing me as the short Asian kid with black hair and a tiny laptop is fine.

But in the long run, I'd like to think that I'm more than just a one-dimensional person to those who know me more closely, and though I write and might initially seem introverted, I am definitely not just "the writer" or "the quiet one". I'm not a label and at the same time your friends aren't either.

Save that for the soda bottles.

Stop tagging your friends in these pictures...no one cares who "the tan one" is.