Tim Challies writes,
Seven hundred billion minutes. That’s how much time Facebook’s 500 million active users spend on the site every month. 700,000,000,000 minutes. Let that one sink in for a moment. Every month we spend the equivalent of 1.3 million years on Facebook; the equivalent of nearly 18,000 lifetimes. More than half of us login every single day; we average 130 friends. And we spend vast amounts of time on there.
Those 700 billion minutes are not minutes that we’ve taken away from other online pursuits. They are minutes that we’ve taken away from real life. Studies show that time spent interacting online comes at the expense of face-to-face relationships and about at a 2:1 ratio. So every hour we spend on Facebook comes at the expense of 30 minutes talking to a person face-to-face. 700 billion minutes are costing us 350 billion minutes of face time. And all of this for something we were living very well without just a few years ago.
He then comments:
This all begs the question: what are we actually doing with our Facebook time? Is what we do there significant enough that it merits the time we dedicate to it? What are we accomplishing with all of those minutes? What do you accomplish with your share of those 700 billion minutes?
A while back I suggested that we might be able to tell what our idols are by looking in our pockets and seeing what we need to have with us all the time. We can also tell what our idols are by seeing where we are spending our minutes and our days. There is clearly something about Facebook that has captivated us, something about it that has drawn us in. For many of us, it is now the place where we live our lives—18,000 of those life times every month.
Tim’s not suggesting we ditch facebook, just think about how we use it as believers and human beings. Read his whole article.
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