10 Signs You Might Need Social Rehab

Here’s an observation that struck me today while I was having dinner with a handful of close friends: things that happen in social spaces are quickly weaving their way into face-to-face interactions in a fairly big way.

I’m not talking about tweetups and other online-inspired gatherings but rather the fact that more and more people I physically hang out with these days start talking about their online activities as a very real part of who they are.

A large chunk of tonight’s dinner conversation was devoted to Farmville and Cafe World on Facebook. Sure, I’d been noticing lots of Facebook friend updates lately about gingerbread men and people making too many Tostadas, but I figured it was just another Facebook app fad for the moment. Until tonight.

Here are 10 signs I’ve compiled that might indicate you’re a candidate for Social Rehab based on tonight’s exchanges with my friends:

1. The Wife got into a fight with the Husband once because he forgot to harvest her crops in Farmville while she was out. The Wife, interestingly, refuses to create her own Facebook profile because she doesn’t want old school friends to find her and tag embarrassing 12-year-old photos. So she uses the Husband’s profile (which probably won’t look good to his bosses since she farms and makes gingerbreads quite often).
2. The Wife set her alarm to ring at 3am one morning just so that she could harvest said crops.
3. When probed further, the wife displayed classic defensive signs of Facebookaholism such as “but I don’t do that anymore, only during waking hours”. To me that sounds like an alcoholic saying “I don’t drink first thing in the morning anymore, just the rest of the day”.
4. The Wife was showing me around her farm and the guest-houses that I could “stay” in. Each guest house has a cat so that I wouldn’t be starved of feline attention online.
5. The Husband, I should add, spends most of his non-verbally-communicative moments lost in his iPhone these days.
6. Another friend’s brother rushed home just to farm (or bake a Tostada, I lost track of which).
7. Abovementioned friend wanted to log in to Cafe World while on holiday just to do some cooking. She also calculated how many days she’d be on holiday and cooked up a storm in advance so her Cafe World would thrive.
8. Yet another friend keeps her laptop beside her while playing mahjong, and takes breaks in the game to cook on Cafe World.
9. My friends gleefully trade secrets to earning more points on Cafe World (gingerbread men are the key apparently).
10. My friends think it’d be a great idea to connect Farmville and Cafe World so you can harvest produce from one to serve up a storm in the other.

I’m almost tempted to go visit this Cafe World to see what the fuss is all about ‘cuz you can’t knock it til you’ve tried it right? But I think I’ll hold off for now and wait for the next 10 interesting observations to surface when we meet for a meal again.

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