I reactivated my facebook account on Sunday evening after discovering — via a random search — that the girl I first ever kissed on the cheek was on there. After twenty years, I felt impelled to say hello and find out how her life had worked out. I would, I told myself, deactivate the thing immediately after. Alas, by the time she replied I found myself sucked into its addictive clutches: adding friends, writing on walls, sizing up my peers.
The popularity of Facebook is deserved I think. Like Myspace, it is very good at presenting all the essential information about a person’s identity into one generic page. It excels Myspace by automatically limiting the dispersal of that information to those people you are “friends” with. This means that if there is someone you are interested in you can’t just be a voyeur, you have to make an approach. This makes it a far more potent source of social validation and anxiety than its rivals. It’s almost like being at school.
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