Facebook Mania: 'Romancing ourselves to death'?

Answer: No. Thanks God, no.

Sura Mo'minoon: Wa hum un-il-laghvi mo'ridhoon: And they keep away from all futile/fruitless activities. [Al-Qur'an]

I wrote some time ago about my 'encounter' with facebook, which was just a little critique of it, despite its relative advantages; no matter much artificial happiness we may get from it, and it may seem too stupendous and overwhelming, but is nonetheless no more than Illusion, for a civilization which is ignorant about true source of peace and happiness tries out anything. However, Indian industry is also suffering from this short-term, as it is destined to be, facebook mania, causing them a 12.5% loss in productivity; this is in those offices where internet is available, and employees are allowed to use social networking sites. Even their own analysts are saying this is dangerous. Here are a few excerpt paras from the news report:

"Indian firms are losing productivity because office staff spend too long on social networking sites, a survey says.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) says workers use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin for "romancing" and other purposes.

"Close to 12.5% of productivity of human resource in corporate sector is misappropriated each day since a vast majority of them while away their time accessing social networking sites during the office hours," according to the findings of Assocham's Social Development Foundation survey.

"As a matter of fact, [the] growing use of browsing sites can be dangerous for overall productivity and IT companies have already installed software to restrict its use," Assocham secretary general DS Rawat said."

Something from the statistical results now:

The survey found that 77% of workers who had Orkut accounts used them during work hours.

Nearly half of office employees accessed Facebook during work time.

Moreover, four in every 10 workers built their entire Orkut or Facebook profile at work, the survey found."

Read complete article here.

Threat is widespread, for instance, "Hampshire County Council is threatening to block staff from using the social networking site Facebook." Saying, "There is no way they should be spending this time when they are supposed to be doing their jobs on a social networking site." [Source.]

But another place its totally banned, "Staff at a Nottinghamshire hospital have been banned from using the social networking website Facebook at work." [Source.]

Though I like this icon...