Every new tool brings with it good things and bad. Fire can cook food, but can also burn you. The computer makes life easier, but also means humanity may someday have to fight machine overlord oppressors, ala' SkyNet. Facebook, too, is a double-edged technological sword. The social networking site, which went mainstream in 2008, is simultaneously magnetic and repellent; a wonderful tool for staying in touch with loved ones and a diabolical instrument for replacing real human contact with a cold digital simulacrum. Also, at least for many guys, Facebook plays a hand in dashing our cherished illusions about girls we used to know.On the face of it (no pun intended) Facebook is certainly usefulto facilitate genuinely social activity; like parties or nights on the town. But, all too often, the site becomes a replacement for real community rather than a builder of it; supplanting true human contact with a fake, idealized version on a flat glowing screen. Instead of people doing things together, like eating drinking, or, think of it, talking face-to-face, Facebook forces people to communicate through hastily written notes or sassy comments about each other's digital photographs.
But who cares? That's life in the early 21st Century, right? At least Facebook allows us the illusion of contact. In an age when friends and family are often scattered across a continent, the illusion is better than nothing.
But what about people you don't want to stay in touch with at all? Therein lies the crux: Facebook insidiously coerces us into having "friends" that we don't like, or possibly even know. The Facebook conundrum is an ever-expanding network of friends-of-friends that leaves you struggling to recall a name or face, trying to figure out if you have ever met the person that just "poked" you.
What's worst, though, is when you people you do know contact you and you wish they wouldn't. Like that long lost girlfriend you adored in high school who now wants to show off pictures of the three puppies she's squeezed out since graduation. There is nothing more disheartening for a man than to see a woman he once idealized all grown-up, fat, wrinkled, married and eager to tell you how her kids are doing in school. Don't these women know how badly we want to retain the illusion of our dream girl, forever 17, and not have that cherished image shattered by meeting her and her dumb husband for drinks? Sometimes, the people in your past are there for a very good reason, and in the past is precisely where they ought to stay.
