For a week, I see what life would be like without logging on to Facebook. I turned off all my notifications, turned away when my girlfriend was logged on watering her virtual plants and avoided all temptation. At the end of the week, I wanted to identify a difference between the useful and non-useful things that social networking provides.

Staying in touch
It turned out that there were only people that I stayed in touch with via Facebook, I didn’t have their current phone number or even email address. I don’t see this as a benefit of Facebook, but a lazy hook that they use to drag you in to their realm. There’s no reason that I shouldn’t have someone’s email address, they must have one to use the site in the first place, so the onus of this one is on me.

Direct Contact
The only new direct information that I learnt was that 4 different people like the photos that I take and I also discovered that a youtube video that I thought was a fake, turned out to be… well… a fake. I understand that you have to give to receive, and maybe with a week of zero interaction, I couldn’t expect much, but  I have to ask; is the time invested in priming these responses really worth it? In the short term, I feel like I get some kind of reward from this feedback, but it feels like a can of diet soda; a nice sweet taste, with zero calories in the long run.

Useful information
Just news that my sister has a cold, and my girlfriends brother posted an interesting dance music blog. I was kind of hoping for more, since all week I’ve been teased with my girlfriends cute little snickering as she checked her profile. I had dreams of side-splitting anecdotes and golden nuggets of enlightenment, but there didn’t seem to be any. What I discovered instead, was a desire to add a few more people to my ‘hide’ list, and that I will strive to post less throwaway comments.

The flip side
In my estimations, I must have diverted around 7 facebook hours, or if I stop lying to myself; 15 hours. So what did I do different this week, that I didn’t do for the past few months? I swam a kilometre at my local pool, went for a hygienist appointment at the dentist, took my cat to the vet to get spayed, created 6 new portraits (cat chappell, kara cabados, phineas kibbey, sue kibbey, magnus huckvale, dj bissen), and paid some attention to the neglected Guitar Hero that has been collecting ageing rocker skin cells in the corner.

I didn’t get a feeling of instant reward at first, where were the people telling me that they liked my photos, where was the feeling of satisfaction when taking my cat to a strange place to be poked and prodded? I learnt that the reward system that I’d become reliant on from Facebook was no more real than the rewards that I eventually derived from myself, but the one big difference, is that I was in control, not some external source. That I can live with.

I still agree with my previous post about life being how you choose to waste your time, so if I was to say that choosing to do things other than check my posts at hourly intervals was any better than playing an imaginary guitar based video game, I’d be a hypocrite (oh wait, I am a human… isn’t it in our nature to subscribe to Hypocrisy?). All that happened this week, is that I chose to do something different, and I enjoyed it. In that sense it was a success. If you are so inclined, I suggest that you make up your own life experiments and put them into practice.

In practise though, the world we live in doesn’t always react the way we expect it to. The element of chance always shows up at some point, and I welcome his unpredictable ways. So when you set out to seek rewards, the outside world can sometimes respond in a manner which is counter productive to your quest. I’ve come up with two possible solutions to this dilemma; You could either ignore the outside world and listen only to the feedback that’s happening in your own head, or you could apply a filter to all the feedback you get and attach relevance to the parts which serve you best.

There is a story about a man who decided to become self motivated… and despite the penalties that loomed over his goal, he carried on regardless and continued to be passionate about something he believed in.

It’s an inspirational story that shows us that it is possible for someone to be passionate about something, despite the attempted influences of the outside world.

Why do we use Facebook, in particular? I asked a couple of people why they used it, and got some interesting responses. Some people get dates, some get business contacts, some get a sense of connection with friends that live too far away and some people simply get entertainment from it. I liked the way one of my friends said that it was like sending a bulk email, but without the guilt of feeling like a spammer (has Facebook managed to simply re-brand the bulk email into something less annoying?). The common thing here, is that we all ‘get’ something. So because we are continuously being provided with ‘rewards’, we continue to use it. There are a limited number of things that we can do on the site, which makes it easier for the other junkies to respond with an encouraging message or a ‘I like this’. Where are the ‘dislike’ links, may I ask? And why is it that we can only ‘like’ something? If we can only respond in this manner with either a neutral (not clicking the like link) or a positive (clicking the link), then where did the negative go? Is the neutral now taking on the role of the negative, and if so, does that mean that the hundred or so people that don’t click that they like the link, actually mean that they don’t like it?

I was going to suggest that Facebook mirrors how we interact with people in our lives outside of our browser portals, but in a fast paced way, driven by the speed of communication that the advent of the internet provides us. It could be regarded as a tool to fish for rewards, except this is the trawler that sucks up a whole load of shrimp in one go. If this was truly a reflection of our normal daily lives; just another step in the progress of man rather than a shift in direction, then why are we encouraged to make only positive comments? I know the option is still there to make negative ones, it’s just not as easy to do so. I imagine that if there was a dislike link, then the number of possible reward catches per day would be reduced by the number of negative dolphins that you caught in your net whilst scraping the bottom of the ocean. I would imagine then, that people would use Facebook less, and that doesn’t seem to be something that this Business would want to happen. So, it’s a controlled system… not exactly a surprise…

Do I want to be getting reward from a system that reflects an over simplified version of communication? I like life, I like it’s complexities. I’m not saying that Facebook is a bad boy and should be sent to his room without any supper, I’m just saying that if you’re going to play together, then just remember that he is slightly retarded and despite it being fun to beat him at Junior Scrabble, don’t neglect your other more intelligent friends, who although won’t be so easy to beat at word games, could provide a much greater reward over a longer period of time (and will actually tell you if they don’t like something).

So when thinking about what I would to have as the things that are important to me in life, I found myself asking the question:

What am I passionate about?

I drew a blank, and so continued to ask myself questions to aid my quest… What does it mean to be passionate? I can sense it, but found it more difficult to put into words.

After a few conversations about what creates passion, I started to see a pattern. All of the people I spoke to seemed to have experienced a series of increasing rewards relating to their obsessions. What caused them to start in the first place still escapes me… I guess that it could be a random chance, if such a thing exists in this world of preordained events.

So, can one become passionate simply by seeking reward for a particular action?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passion_(emotion)