A Defense of Facebook (from a Luddite)

I mostly don't care where you are currently visiting, the pictures you've taken, or your misleading relationship status with a person of the same-sex (appropriate for women apparently, but not for men). But I'm realizing I do care enough to want to be able to know a little about you. We move a lot these days--from our parents' houses to college, (often) back to our parents' houses, to summer camps, to graduate school (maybe), and first jobs, many of us have lived in three or four states in the first quarter-century of our lives. If you're a military brat it may be many more.

So we turn to Facebook. It's not pretty; in fact sometimes it's absolute fodder for satire. Yet, it has a beauty to it in spite of all that. For the first time in history each one of us has a platform to tell friends, acquaintances, and that girl we met at the bar last night the same thing at the same time across spaces over which conventional communication balks.

I don't love Facebook; we have a rather uneasy relationship. How often have you found that you can have weekly, even daily communication with a person on Facebook but it's weird if ever you talk face-to-face? That's a sign that things aren't quite right. But they aren't quite wrong either. We still need one another, and on some level we're longing to be connected. A Facebook without friends is nothing at all.

This year the Concord has been using peoples' Facebook pictures for our back cover more or less without their permission. Before doing this I checked into some of the Fair Use laws and it's pretty clear we can do that--perhaps even if you don't want us to. I'm not going to claim that we have been doing this as any social experiment; frankly, it's just easier. Yet, it is also clear that we get many more interesting photos this way--photos taken completely out of context. It's not unusual for a back page person to come up to one of us after the issue comes out and say, "I don't even remember what I was doing there." Neither do we, we weren't there, but we get to share in it. Strange, interesting, and perhaps a step forward for authentic community.

Perhaps. I'm not going any further than that! :-)