I was 17 when I realized my peers were selling their souls to MySpace. As a graduating senior, I found it ridiculous that most my yearbook classmates were logged into their MySpace accounts as they worked on assignments in class.

The number of “friends” attested to their popularity and a personalized profile with flashy icons and colorful backgrounds became another outlet for visual creativity.

My classmates were shocked to learn I did not have a MySpace account I maintained. It was just a distracting fad. As graduation day approached, I realized MySpace could be the next best thing to seeing my friends every day.

I was leaving high school, after all, and couldn’t imagine losing touch with certain people. So, I signed up for an account. Over the course of seven years, the allure of MySpace dwindled as my frustration with social media grew. While I had fun “pimping out” my profile every day with various HTML codes, I found it annoying that comments from friends were mostly random advertisements. Guys in their teens to their mid-40’s would send messages like, “Hey, sexy” and “What’s up, cutie?” How did this alternative avenue of communication become a billboard and meat market?

When my friends signed up for Facebook accounts I envisioned a similar frustration with social media. People just found a new way to “holler” by joining a different online network, and a new way to stay at the top with technology. Though I was reluctant to sign up for a Facebook account, I decided it would benefit my professional network, since Facebook seemed more appealing to working professionals. Plus, it seemed more of my family members joined Facebook than those that had a MySpace.

Facebook replaced MySpace, and Twitter became the new black. Along came Tumblr, and Instagram, and next thing you know blogging, picture sharing and short “tweets” became the most popular way to keep up with the world. It is the trend and overstressed importance of social networking that robs relationships of their face value. Accounting major, Roberto Alcaraz, says Facebook diminishes direct communication between people. “[Facebook] eliminates [peoples’] face-to-face contact with each other,” says Alcaraz. “If you’re talking to someone on Facebook, you have no reason to go out of the house and meet up with them.”

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Navarro says too much Facebook is not healthy.

“People need to go out and have fun with real human beings,” says Navarro.

For some students, having fun with family members is not an option.

Andrew Lim, a 24-year-old undeclared major at City College, says he uses Facebook to keep in touch with his family in the Philippines and to schedule meetings with old friends. He uses Twitter for business opportunities, gaming and for his comic book networks. While some students take advantage of technology to keep in touch with family and friends, others overuse it. Take for example, that one cousin you may have, or that one friend you know, who uses social media as a way to gossip without actually speaking to anyone. How lame is that?

I’m not complaining about social media but reminding students it’s just another tool we can use for convenience. It is also something that we can easily obsess over if we forget about the people in the world we like to spend time with. For those of us who use Facebook because we got sick of MySpace, we should probably remember, it’s just a network. Whether we use it for professional or personal connections is up to us.