I have resisted joining Facebook for many years. My wife has been an active participant, spending hours on line "interacting" with her friends and acquaintances, but I have tossed FB of as nothing more that a passing fad.
Then I finished "The Social Animal" by David Brooks, which changed my mind about society in general and social networks in particular. Brooks doesn't really address that much the phenomena of social networking, but it doesn't take much to extrapolate from his wonder of our well-socialized minds and brains to what Facebook is all about. We are wired to "interact" with each other at fairly sophisticated levels, starting from infancy on. Social networks are a natural extension over computer networks of that innate ability and desire to connect. "Just connect," Forester once wrote -- and the consequences of "just connecting" are astounding. And fun.
It is fun to catch-up with old classmates and friends, connect with acquaintances you'd like to know better, commiserate with my sister, flirt with what must be a kind of on-line prostitute, and ignore my wife. It is fun to discover whatever happened to some old acquaintances. I'm still not sold on online games, but I can see their usefulness. I don't want to spend much more time on Facebook, but I can see devoting some of my time to it.
