What is Facebook for? Its for connecting with people you know on the web.
Its for turning the web and internet surfing, which has taken a life of its own as a lifestyle trend, as something you must do because it fills a need in real life, into something more familiar. It humanizes the web.
The web is a confusing, repetitive, boring, place. It is an essentially boring and inhuman place. Yes, it interests you, but it interests you only within the context of your boredom and frustration in real life. You wouldn't be on the internet if you had real stuff to do, or if the world was in your control. You'd be using it like a upgraded form of email, if life was swell. The internet is another medium of art, art being a re-creation of reality in higher forms to satisfy something lacking in the real. (In fact, the internet is THE medium of art of today, websites being hyper-democratic art forms: one can on this basis alone predict the drive to aesthetic complexity of website design as architectural spaces of communication.)
Virtual is an always an inferior reality, but it is a superior form to non-reality, which is its role to substitute.
Social networking works on this essential frustration - it is promise of socialist utopia in its most inferior imaginable form.
Now, you will dismiss: this is the rambling of a sad loner; one who does not realize that Facebook is the most efficient means of concerning yourself adequately intimately with the life of a large circle of busy and interesting friends, and therefore with the life of the community as a whole - it is an information bank and an actionable tool in the social arsenal. Perhaps. I concede. But it is both.
Then: A measure of the degree of social deficit and deficits in other modes of social interaction. Lovely.
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