This is Living?

This ad has risen to the top of my all-time favorite commercials:



Favorite lines:

"I read an article...well, I read the majority of an article online...."

"I have 687 friends. This is living." 

What a brilliant ad. Yes, it's promoting the 2011 Toyota Venza. But I love the jab at the Facebook-addled Internet generation (and apparently, internet addiction is becoming a real medical "condition," along with gaming addiction) who need to "get a life."

These are my students!

Of course, it's not just 20-somethings who are "addicted" to social media. Here's the latest from Facebook's Statistics page:

People on Facebook:

• More than 750 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

 Activity on Facebook:

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month. 

Mobile Users:

• There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products 

That's a lot of people spending a lot of minutes per day interacting at (what most people would agree is) a fairly superficial level.