Lent receives an upgrade

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

The originally Catholic tradition of giving up luxuries for Lent has just gone high-tech.

A recent cnn.com article reported many young adults giving up social networking sites for Lent, with Facebook and MySpace being the most popular of the genre.

Lent, which lasts from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday, encompassing 40 days and nights which represents the amount of time Jesus supposedly spent in the desert being tempted by the devil, may seem like an awfully long time to give up anything. But, people do it every single year, with varying degrees of success.

Normally, food items such as chocolate or soda are given up, and in some cases, as evidenced in the movie “40 Days and 40 Nights” starring Hollywood heartthrob Josh Hartnett, people give up sex for Lent. But giving up social networking websites for Lent? That’s taking the sacrifice past pleasures of the body and into pleasures of the Internet.

Some may say social networking sites are a form of technological masturbation where users can increase their self-esteem, thereby increasing that pleasurable, happy feeling in the brain, by seeing just how many “friends” they have. At least, according to the Internet, where becoming someone’s friend is just one click of the mouse away. So, I guess you could equate giving up online social networking for Lent to giving up sex. Or not.

Many of those interviewed in the cnn.com article stated they wanted to give up their online addictions so they could focus more time on other, more worthwhile things, such as homework, spirituality or actual human contact.

I find this an incredibly noble thing to do, as many of us spend entirely too much time on the Internet, and on sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Our actual social skills, which have (hopefully) been honed in us since birth by our parents and other authority figures, have gone down the drain. No one can write or speak correctly anymore. Why should I learn how to actually spell “through” when everyone on the Internet simply types “thru”? Why should I take ALL the time to say something’s funny when I can type “lol” and get the point across that way?

As for our recent developments in stalking tactics thanks to these sites, where we can find out if someone is in or out of a relationship, where he or she partied last weekend and what a person will spend spring break doing by going to one page on the Internet, I think abstaining from such places is a good idea. The fewer the stalkers on this planet, the better, in my opinion.

However, there are some inherent flaws with the plans of one of these students’ idea. A 16-year-old high school student, Emily Montgomery, decided to give up using her MySpace account for Lent. All fine and good.

However, she switched to Facebook in order to maintain her social contact. Does anyone else see a problem with this? Giving up one social networking site for another is not a sacrifice; it is simply trading apples for apples.

My opinion in this matter is, if you’re going to go, go big and stick to it. That’s why I agree more with what Emory University sophomore Jocelyn Chiu decided to give up for Lent. She gave up using the Internet entirely.

I’m not knocking any of the people out there who have decided to give up online social networking for Lent; I think it’s a great idea and think maybe it should be practiced a little more often by a larger segment of the population who spend their time obsessing about the little details found on someone’s account.

However, I’m praising Chiu for her daring attempt at returning her life to a time when it was not filled with sitting in a chair and staring at a group of pixels on a screen. She has been able to find many other worthwhile things to do with her time – not saying the Internet isn’t useful; I use it for many things which I view as extremely important – and has stopped spending all her time learning the minutiae of the social habits of the species we call young adult.

I think we can all learn a lesson from our peers who are giving up their precious social networking sites for 40 whole days, where some of us can barely make it 40 whole minutes without checking who sent us Facebook messages or whether or not anyone has responded to our MySpace posts.

Perhaps everyone should consider going low-tech for awhile and trying those “old fashioned” methods of communication such as cellular phones or, gasp!, even having a face-to-face conversation. You may find it more rewarding than you think, and might be tempted to try it more often.