Imagine this scenario. You arrive home after a long day at school, drop your bag down on the floor, and pull out that assignment you’ve been procrastinating on forever. You look at the clock – its 5:00 PM and decide that there’s definitely enough time to get that assignment done before the midnight due date. You sit down in front of your computer and sign into Facebook just to check if you have any new messages or wall postings. You browse around the site and laugh at your friend’s photos from an “animal themed” party, write on a couple people’s walls, send a message to your best friend, comment on a picture or two… Content that you have done enough daily socializing, you look up at the clock only to realize that it’s 9:00 PM! That can’t be right, you check your cell phone time and realize that you have just wasted the last 4 hours that you had wanted to dedicate to that 10 page essay, to Facebook.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any capitalistic thinker would be appalled at your behaviour because as a general rule, technology was developed to save time and make things more efficient. All technologies are supposedly created with a social group and value in mind. The social group Facebook was originally targeted towards was college students who were to be able to save time by joining this online social networking site where they could easily collaborate with other students and make friends faster. This seems like an oxymoron considering all the time that is wasted by student use of Facebook.
This in itself is an excellent demonstration of the interpretive flexibility of technologies – what was meant to save time, has been transformed into something we use to waste time. It just goes to show you what big procrastinators college students are – what was created for the specific purpose of saving time, has been transformed into the ultimate antagonist of productivity.
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