In Your Facebook

Facebook was originally aimed at college students. Indeed, you couldn't get an account if you didn't have a school account. Then, they let the floodgates open, and anyone could get an account. People began to see Facebook as a more mature MySpace.

I had vaguely entertained the idea of getting an account despite being out of the typical demographic. To be fair, ever since Facebook let anyone join, the average age has probably jumped 10 years, so the typical user is more likely to be 30 than 20 (as with many blogs, I assert this with only a scarce recollection as my only evidence).

But nothing much was pushing me to get the account until a former student signed up for one, and apparently used one of his IM clients and spammed everyone on the list, which included me. I hadn't spoken to him in a bit. I knew he moved and had gotten married, but since his IM was beckoning me to try it out, I set one up.

Of course, once you add one person, then you want to add another, and then somehow, it networks, and people you knew, find you, and they want to add you. It's worse than LinkedIn.

Indeed, one tends to spend time doing little things, trying to join networks to join a group, and so forth. There's still a little bit of elitism (meant to protect folks I suppose) and some hoops one must jump through to get access to certain groups.

I suppose the novelty will wear off, except, of course, your "friends" can ping you and then send messages and you can see them update their page, and so forth.

Makes you wonder how this generation of kids, the one that sits past Generation X (I probably fit in that generation, though I'm sure few of the adjectives that applied to that generation apply to me, which in fact, was probably a smaller generation than one might imagine, concocted by the media desperate to try to understand the most vocal segment of the youth population).

It's the Internet generation, and they've learned you don't need to be a programmer to use the Internet. And the desire to be popular has extended far beyond the confines of Ivy League campuses and far beyond the sea of lockers that line hallways of high schools throughout the country. You call people your friends that hardly know you. Oh you were the guy that was at this party that was with this girl who had the accident. You know.

Still, with those AJAX forms fading in and out, the Web 2.0 goodness that says not only are we cool among kids but we're cool among geeks too.

Will being a member of Facebook tell me what's going on in the world of college kids. Will new trends come out that the media once defined, and now might self-organize? We're connected in more ways than ever before, and yet, we may know each other less well than before.

Thus, social networking may be increasing asocial, as the average contact per "friend" decreases until this commodity we call "friend" is something like tag, a label we place on others, so we can have the most toys.