Facebook

It's still pretty amazing when you think about it. Despite the scams and ubiquitous solicitation, the stalkers and the predators and the fact that it provides a forum for some truly despicable elements of society, the internet is a technological and cultural marvel.

Far be it for me to render an opinion on the whole thing. Last year, I checked the website of an anarchist organization for updates about the Republican National Convention protests, and not just because I share their viewpoint, but because they had better information than any corporate news outlet. To be fair, as I was doing so I'm sure some depraved piece of human garbage was using Myspace to attempt to lure some poor, unsuspecting young person into a terrible rendezvous.

Hey, all I'm saying is that it's impressive.

Chances are, if you use the internet, you probably spend a lot of time on a social networking website. These rose out of the old html-based chat rooms, message boards, and later blogs, refining the internet's capacity for communication by streamlining the process. This is what the smart people were doing back then while the rest of us were using the internet to discuss whether the Galactic Empire could defeat the United Federation of Planets in a war -- I mean, uh... looking at porn.

Each successive wave of this phenomenon has taken the wild, untapped potential of the internet and harnessed it, making it more and more accessible -- or, if you taught yourself html years ago thinking it would give you some incredible edge and feel like being a jerk about it, dumbed it down for the masses.

In any case, I was certainly not surprised at the more recent emergence of Twitter. While it certainly has some comedic and subversive potential, at its heart, it's nothing more than a list of the inane thoughts your acquaintances are presently having.

Although there seems to be some speculation that it will eventually be overshadowed by Twitter, I for one believe Facebook will be with us for some time. Something very much like it will be, at any rate. The reason for this is that Facebook has just the right combination of accessibility and control. And unlike Myspace, a wrong move won't saddle you with nine thousand viruses or -- even worse -- an unscheduled sample of the newest album from some fourteen year old's atrocious whatever-core band.

If you have a blog, or even a Myspace page, you are going to be judged by your content. Whether it's travel writing, food blogging, or just profile customization, you must create something for the whole thing to be worthwhile. On Facebook, there is so little in the way of creativity that the bar has been lowered almost to the ground. You just have to be yourself.

What are your favorite books? Cool. What bands do you like? That's awesome. Me, too. It's like making drunken small talk with everyone on the internet.

Facebook also cleverly dodged a fair amount of controversy by starting out as a service exclusively directed at college kids. Apparently, If high school seniors have an outlet to encourage and document drinking, screwing, and making bad decisions it's a menace to society. If college freshmen do it, it's an industry.

It's a lucrative industry at that. A relatively small staff can operate something like Facebook. And although it may help to show the ladies what a sensitive and smart dude you are, all that info you put into your profile to make yourself seem interesting can help them zero in on the right kind of advertising to show you. Facebook made around three hundred million last year.

We're living in the world that was depicted in science fiction written earlier in our lives. I grew up in a fairly rural, off-the-map sort of place. If you told my younger self that one day I'd write articles that could be transmitted nigh-instantaneously all over the world, I'd think it was fantasy. It's astonishing that this has taken place in such a short period of time, but it's also astonishing to see how we've used this technology.

I expect I would have imagined the internet as a great liberating force. A world in which everyone is given a voice and ideas can be exchanged freely with little interference from authority sounds like a utopia. Instead, it's often used to reduce us to lists, statistics, marketing demographics. I certainly would have believed that this technology could be used for evil, but I never thought we'd willingly do so much of the work.

It's still impressive, but where do we go from here?