Americans have always relished the role of stretching things to their extremes. Supersize it. More nuclear weapons than you can shake an olive branch at. Five blades for the closest shave ever!
Unfortunately, we have also taken the art of wasting time to its ultimate and unavoidable climax: FarmVille.
I'll wait for those of you who just raced to harvest some strawberries on Facebook to get back. You're welcome for the reminder.
Anyway, Americans have been creating new ways to waste time since someone invented those annoying handcrafted wooden puzzles you can buy in Amish country. With the advent of the Internet, though, things have quickly gotten out of hand.
Many say the Web is the greatest tool available to mankind, an immeasurable and unprecedented well of information easily available to most people in the modern world. So why does my 60-something mother only go online to play Collapse? Why do I find myself shooting zombies in Flash pop-up advertisements?
Why has Wikipedia morphed from a free reference for schoolwork into a blinking neon sign of useless information? How, while researching a paper, did I discover that the grey-haired cop from Reno 911! voiced the Taco Bell Chihuahua and Rocko from Rocko's Modern Life?
Maybe Americans really are getting lazier. Or perhaps the Web simply offers more time-killers to satisfy our notoriously short attention spans.
Either way, entrepreneurs make a killing from time killing. According to the New York Times, Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006, expects to pull more than $1.5 billion in revenue by the end of 2013. Both Fmylife.com and textsfromlastnight.com have secured book deals.
Tom Anderson and Mark Zuckerberg (founders of MySpace and Facebook, respectively) are at this moment sharing a $100,000 bottle of wine in Barbados, grinning like two nerds at a Stargate convention.
Of course, trivial and funny sites are necessary. Without them, the Internet would be a communist wasteland of scientific papers and pornography. Only a soulless misanthrope doesn't enjoy the occasional text from last night or one of Shaq's misspelled Twitter updates.
A problem arises when people actively pursue such petty Web pastimes instead of spending their time on something productive. Much like psychological disorders, time killing doesn't become a problem until it inhibits one's ability to be a productive member of society.
Facebook is a perfect example. Most people can't just check their profiles once every few days to see if someone wrote on their wall or sent them a friend request. It seems the average Facebooker feels compelled to follow random acquaintances and religiously cree - I mean, click through pictures from Saturday night.
The evil oligarchy in charge of Facebook understands that people have an incurable hunger for random updates from random friends, so they feed the masses. News Feed them.
I tolerated it up until FarmVille.
When someone invests that much time into a fruitless and fictional time waster that is built inside of a time waster, something has gone terribly wrong.
If you're going to spend hours per week checking your fake crops, you might as well spend the same amount of time planting real crops. It's not hard. Michelle Obama doesn't play FarmVille. She cares for a real garden that produces good fruits and publicity.
If you are a current resident of FarmVille, please reconsider. You are too young. Or at least start paying people like me to tend to your digital crops for you.
Benjamin White is a sophomore studying psychology and copy editor for The Post. Send him Mob Wars invitations at bw237709@ohiou.edu
4 Opinion
Ben White
