The intertwined social networking sites….. are they worth the precious time of ours?

When I was still a school going girl, boarding my jeep with a truckload of books, yapping with my jeep mates and then with my classmates and then after school with my parents….., the world seemed much simpler and less sophisticated. Every section of the world seemed to be a world in itself. Those days telephone was the only distraction for youth. Ever since the arrival of social networking, things have definitely changed for good but I won’t say for better! Perhaps, a human being now interacts virtually more than ever, than otherwise. Sigh!

7 years back, when orkut rose to an undisputed popularity with a huge number of people flooding into social networking as if it were some lottery machine. I too was one of them, obviously like any teen; I was enjoying social networking as I got to know a lot of people, yes many of them were strangers of course! The cult of social networking kick started with orkut and Hi5 and caught pace with the recent ones like Facebook and Myspace and what not. Thankfully, I did not drown into the networking aspect, although am a 'little' addicted to it! However, I wonder, where we don’t have time to spend with the near and dear ones, these sites just continue to gobble up the left over time.....Sad, but true!

With emergence of facebook, networking has taken to a different level altogether. At least orkut had age limitation of 18 years, for facebook it is just 13 years. Mark Zuchenberg has definitely managed to bring the world closer and has even managed to shrink it so much that every tom, dick and harry knows what is happening in every other person's life as to whether the information carries relevance or not is altogether a different story. Facebook apart from the networking part, houses a hundred applications of games, social interviews, puzzles and what not. The game front amongst all is the most popular one which includes Farmville, fishville, mafia wars, Café world and many more. When I was working at a client site, I never could use even a Gmail for that matter as it was all blocked but now after quitting my job, I just realized how many people these gaming applications can seduce and render jobless. Even people working in office get addicted heavily to FB. And it is no news that games are like drugs. They suck you into their world and make you dwell in it. But all this makes me wonder, are these sites worth our precious time? Definitely worth pondering….. Period!