There's no shortage of opinions out there on the wonders and evils of Facebook, but I'll give you mine anyway, and concisely: it's not good.
I'm not one of these people who thinks Zuckerberg is a diabolical genius or Facebook is a deliberate mind-control device, but I have my reservations about its value and effects nonetheless. On one hand it's an easy way to stay in touch with people; on the other, 'staying in touch' seems increasingly an exercise in voyeurism more so than friendship maintenance. Facebook's design is such that there's an immediacy to everything, which is kind of creepy and usually, at least in my experience, unfulfilling. I suspect that many of us have the experience of pausing at our desks with the realization that we've just done little more than waste a lot of time browsing the insipid details of people we barely know in any meaningful sense (and even if we know them well and care about events in their lives, we don't care about ALL the events in their lives).
It doesn't take a genius to point out that this level of contact is very superficial. We accept this as given when we use and talk about Facebook; we don't really think we're actually 'connecting,' despite Facebook's fondness for that particular gerund, unless we take 'connecting' about as literally as it means to 'connect' your computer to an ethernet port. This is to say that, whether or not Facebook makes us lonely, it probably doesn't do us much good relative to the time it, by design, commands.
When I thought about this, and what else I could be doing with my finite time on this planet, it occurred to me that this sort of connection is very appealing to people in their (relative) youth, when they're not thinking about whether someday, when they're old and dying, they'll wish they'd gone outside on a sunny day or read a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel or baked bread for a neighbor instead of staring at a Facebook page, waiting for a little red '1' to appear at the top of the screen signaling a new event of banality. Generally I don't like to partake of dramatic, sweeping, 'goodbye cruel world' gestures like unplugging myself from entire digital worlds; but I figured that sometimes it takes a little bit of a grand gesture to break a bad or unsatisfactory habit. So I explored seriously the idea of leaving Facebook, and warned my 'friends' of my intentions.
A funny thing happened.
Much of what I've read about disputes over the intellectual property of Facebook concerns claims to various portions of codewriting and/or the kind of general idea for an online 'face book' that at least one person in every college had back in 2003. But the real genius of Facebook lies in the fact that, in its present state, which may well have been envisioned to some extent, leaving Facebook means leaving your friends. Yes, I would love to leave the entity known as Facebook by the wayside, and I don't think I'd miss it; but in the process of trying to shed this thing, I provoked a range of responses from friends, ranging from merely annoyed to downright upset. How else would they be in touch with me? Would they have to subscribe to another or an additional social networking service? Wasn't that bold of me? Won't I be back?
Yes, the great genius of Facebook is that, while it's easy enough for a principled person to say no to faceless and possibly insidious corporate entity, it's not so easy to say no to your friends.
