As a 2-year-removed college grad, an adherent to no particular religion (other than The Religion of Non-Stop Awesomeness), and a relative newcomer to the Facebook scene, I was surprised to hear the WSJ report that giving up Facebook for Lent was all the campus rage last year and has since spread to include the equally hapless older demographic (i.e., parents).
It's incredible to me that Facebook's has achieved "vice" status and that abstaining from it for little over a month now qualifies as honoring Jesus' 40 days in the wildernes. I mean, dude didn't eat, practiced strict abstinence, and resisted temptation from the Devil himself all in the name of his faith. And what are we doing? Why, 40 days without Facebook, of course!
Wait a minute. None at all? Cold turkey? Just like that? Does that mean I can't update my status hourly to tell all my 360 "friends" that "Alex Weaver is super psyched for the Snuggie Pub Crawl!" or throw a virtual snowball at some kid I went to kindergarten with?
Clearly I am not nearly as hooked as most. But I still find it ironic - nay, downright hilarious - that by abstaining from Facebook for Lent, college kids everywhere are basically freeing up time otherwise spent poking strangers to partake in activities that, piously speaking, they'd probably be better off giving up instead. (I've seen people driven to the bottle for less.)
Whatever the case, I can't find a more convincing proof of the power and persistence of social networking in today's society than the fact that people, both young and old, feel like giving it up actually means something. My question now is...
Do you consider Facebook a vice worthy of giving up for Lent?
How can one love thy brother and thy sister without quantifying and qualifying him or her through a large-scale dehumanizing database? Thou shalt NOT abstain from Facebook!
I think giving up is giving up. Lent isn't a particularly hard period of abstinence; I mean, tell it to my office mate who can't eat or drink all day for the length of Ramadan. But it is a period of giving up, and if you're hooked on Facebook and can't see spending time away from it for 40 days, maybe foregoing it up will show you that your priorities are out of whack (if you're a practicing Anglican or Catholic, you'll probably guess where your priorities are supposed to be set.) So as not to get too soapboxy, I'm going on a Carbon Fast as the Church of England is suggesting. Hey look at me, no meat for 40 days! Click Here