If a lonely pink cow is roaming a virtual farm and no one is there to first find it and then exclaim, ‘Oh no!’, is the Internet doing its job at all? While a recent MSNBC article on the dangers of being sucked into Farmville and other similar Facebook games ran on the news giant’s website, the quadrillions of Facebook Farmers whom it condemned were left snidely snickering. Real agriculture, like real talking, real photography and real journalism, is being replaced by the virtual variety. As the economy continues to tank, real agriculture ‘- the kind with hoes and tractors and stems and harvesting ‘- is impractical. No one can afford to buy a carrot, no less grow one. It is the barnfulls of Farmville players – or employees – who are now doing the producing. By providing personal information over the Internet in exchange for a sprawling pixilated farm of their own, they are stimulating online ad revenue and ‘farming’ in a very millennial way. That is, they’re growing money!
Without the Farmville farmers ‘- of which there are troughs full ‘- all of those little personalized ads that explode excitingly onto one’s screen while one is, say, trying to read a fashion blog or trying to play Mafia Wars, wouldn’t be nearly as target-hitting. And money wouldn’t be pouring out of advertising offices as Farmvillers themselves spend endless hours collecting blue ribbons for their outstanding strawberry milk crops, forgetting their real ‘- and frankly, fruitless ‘- jobs in real life. What some people ‘- the unconnected ‘- may view as a waste of time, Farmville users see as a service to the online society. And if it wasn’t such a civilized livelihood, would there be such things as Good Samaritan ribbons? Absofarmvillelutely not.
Even if it weren’t an economically sound alternative to actual farming, and a practical way for a young professional to spend his or her cubical time ‘- nursing virtual black stray kittens back to health is far more a moral duty than is compiling spreadsheets ‘- Farmville offers the additional emotional benefit of being an escape from real life problems. In Farmville, there are no droughts, there is no global climate change and there is a Dairy Farm feature that allows users to be able to milk 20 cows simultaneously, as well as the ability to sustain temperate and tropical crops on one single plot.
It happens to everyone -‘- after hours of Facebooking, users can become restless and unfulfilled. The Farmville application is a great way for users to give back, to exercise their green thumbs (and index and middle fingers) on the keyboard for a while, to dig deep into the most fertile American soil to be found (the virtual kind) and really plant something. The pink cows need finding, the ad companies need personal information and the average American’s time needs wasting. These are the burdens of the Facebook Farmers.
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