Linda Is Writing About Facebook Updates

I like this little piece in The New York Times about Facebook updates. Virginia Heffernan is right about the brightness with which people express detail at times. Some of my friends post very creative status updates, and they are, indeed, little bursts of great writing.

But what was really curious to me was the extraordinary hostility expressed in some of the comments attached to the piece. Like this one:

All this social nattering is a waste of time. Meaningful discussion and the exchange of ideas is sacrificed to virtual graffiti. Visitors from another galaxy will unearth the Facebook/My Space/Twitter phenomenon a thousand years from now, concluding that the human species were suddenly stricken dumb by some terrible degenerative disease.

Or this one:

useless noise. go about your business, then call on your actual friends once in a while, to catch up.

Or this one:

call a friend or go see him/her. join the peace corp. help someone. take a walk, work a soup kitchen, stop this adolecent, narcissistic, self-absorpsion called facebook and myspace and texting, growing like insidious cancer...there, that dramatic enough for your facebook update?

Or here's a good one:

If even half the time spent on "social networking" was actually spent increasing our knowledge, we would have known why ARM's aren't good for us, why producing things made of air aren't profitable, and why the time wasted on any of this are hours of our lives we'll never get back.

The litmus test is not whether you can get a clever update posted, it's whether or not having this is essential to survival. The answer is no.

I will admit that Facebook is not essential to survival. But...why would anyone be so angry about a purely voluntary system in which other people engage in what is primarily small talk?

Yes, I care what you had for dinner: after the jump...

 

The other day, I posted a status update about a TV show I was watching that led to a brief exchange with two girls I knew in high school. Haven't seen them in many years; didn't stay in touch with them. We went to college, we lived in different places — you lose track of people.
But despite all that, the other day, we had a funny little exchange about a TV show.

I am Facebook friends with my sister's college roommate, of whom I have enormously warm recollections because of how much I idolized my sister and loved going to visit her when I was sixteen and she was at Duke. I am Facebook friends with people who I met because they read my writing, with people I knew casually in college, and with a guy I was reprimanded for flirting with IN FIFTH GRADE.

And yes, I care what they had for dinner. And yes, I care that their kids are cute. I care if they just made a birthday cake for a three-year-old; I care if they're in Paris; I care if they didn't like Slumdog Millionaire.

None of this prevents me from knowing who my friends are, from seeing them in person, or from calling them on the phone. I am capable of overriding Facebook's terminology enough to understand the difference between my friends and my old acquaintances. It's...it's just contact. Why is anyone angry?

If you are my Facebook friend, I do care what book you just read, what song is stuck in your brain, that you can't sleep, that you've had a bad week, or that you're experiencing the best weather of your life. I know you; this is the hum of your life. Why wouldn't I care? And more to the point, is it really likely that it would have averted the mortgage crisis if I didn't?