Who needs a brain when we have Facebook?

The 21^st century, an age full of technology previously thought impossible. We have robots cleaning our houses, we have microwaves cooking our meals in a couple of minutes, we have GPS navigators helping us find our way... The list goes on and on. Even so, I think pretty much everybody can agree on one piece of technology as what truly defines this century: The internet. The internet allows us to exchange information globally at any time and in practically unlimited quantities. Surely, with this kind of information at hand we must have become far more enlightened than ever, right? Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case. While the internet is being used to share new knowledge, it’s primarily being used for sharing mindless updates or random headlines on social networks such as Facebook.

The rise of the social network

Facebook is most likely the most popular website on the internet. With 500 million users worldwide, it’s actually starting to become uncommon not to have an account if you live in the Western World. This site, along with other social networks such as Twitter, allows us to instantly share anything we want at any time. Various corporations and other organizations are actively using this option to give their followers constant updates on everything from news stories and offers to updates on what the organization is planning. However, most updates come from individual persons. And most of these updates simply aren’t relevant for anyone except the one who writes it. A typical Facebook update would say something along the lines of “I’m soo drunk right now lol xD”. Other updates could contain random lyrics from various songs or tell that they had just finished breakfast. Ever since Facebook became popular, we have just been sharing whatever pops into our minds. We don’t ask ourselves why anybody would care about this kind of stuff, we just post it.

“Like” EVERYTHING!

Today, Facebook is no longer limited to its own website. You can share stuff from pretty much any website on the internet. Online newspapers, blogs, Youtube, online games, in short everything online has a “like” button that allows you to instantly share what you found. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you find something interesting, you can share it. And guess what? Someone might actually find this interesting unlike the status about that guy being drunk for the third time this month. This feature also means that you can now see various news headlines when you open Facebook. Due to this, a lot of people get their news primarily through Facebook. The only problem is that a lot of people only see the headlines and nothing else. They don’t read the whole article; they might not even see where the article comes from. They only see a few headlines that some of their friends found interesting. They might miss the most important news and instead learn that Justin Bieber just got a new haircut. They might even see a headline from The Onion thinking it’s the real thing (The Onion is satirical false news station). This means that what they get to know might be irrelevant, inaccurate or even wrong.

Getting priorities straight

Now what does all this mean? We have access to amounts of information beyond imagination, yet we spend our time on Facebook, reading people’s complaints about their hangovers every Saturday morning. We don’t spend time reading long in-depth articles, but rather just read the headlines of whatever pops up. Some people even tend to respond to everything above five lines with TL;DR: Too long; didn’t read. Why do we reject the opportunity to receive any relevant information at will, when we have this opportunity? Why do we choose to share tiny mindless details without knowing if anybody cares about them at all? Is this what the world has come to? Will Facebook completely replace our brains? Or can we do something about it?