Facebook South Parked

Facebook, you have now been South Parked. The recent episode where the boys create a Facebook profile for Stan which slowly starts to invade his life and tick him off, right up to the point where he has to encounter his powerful profile in a fight to the finish over a Yahtzee tournament is pure solid gold as satire and social commentary. It represents the best of South Park, a controversial and irreverent show which often stings with its offensive and immature nature, just as much as its biting observations about the ridiculous nature of people.

It's hard to believe that South Park didn't make up the fact that Facebook includes harvesting crops and playing board games online. What a colossal waste of time. Not only does Facebook create this strange, artificial world where people are 'friends' with anyone they can find online, but it also suckers them in with useless activities that lock its users on computers for hours at a time, poking, updating, messaging, changing their status, harvesting crops...what the hell? Who has time to be doing all of this crap? Who has hours to spend a night doing this?

Think about all of the quality time that you could spend with a real friend, a person of actual flesh and blood, who could actually come over to your house or meet you at a pub for a real conversation. Think of how deep and meaningful your friendships in real life could be if you devoted that much time to it. You could actually create a real small garden at home with free hours every night. If you got off the stupid computer, stopped poking and updating profiles for no apparent reason, you could have enough time to have your friend over for dinner with basil that you've grown yourself out of a pot on your terrace.

Social networking does have its place, especially for those who are displaced, traveling abroad, or who are living apart from the people that mean the most to them. But for the rest of us, we could be spending a lot more time focusing on where we actually are and who actually surrounds us, rather than who's online at the same time.

South Park gets it right again.