I had a kind of mini revelation tonight while looking at Facebook, watching American Idol, and petting my two cats, having finished an excellent home-cooked meal of lentils with tofu bacon and an arugala salad with blue cheese and beets at our friends’ house.
Oh, the revelation was that looking at people on Facebook (e.g. finding friends, learning about what friends are doing, and updating my own page) is essentially equivalent to shopping at Amazon. I take a look at the reviews, decide on who I want to virtually befriend, and then check in on the status of the order occasionally. With Facebook, the order is a human life. And, looking at hundreds of faces scroll by, I couldn’t help but think of our individual expiry dates, when we’re pulled from the shelves, taken back to somewhere, far away from the eyes of others. In ten or twenty or thirty or forty of fifty years, someone will pull down my page and there will be a thousand others to replace me on that sliver of server space.