Facebook: A Mixed Review

Thus far I've resisted the social networking trend. I'm probably the only woman who is not "friended" to all 259 members of her high school graduating class. So many of them are worth forgetting. Maybe most, in fact. My sister, however, lives and dies by Facebook. I'm not sure why since she only comments on the status of about ten of her 577 friends. A guy recently told me that for males, getting a large number of friends is rather like a contest, like chugging beer or like rams savagely butting their horns together. It's a testosterone thing, or at least that's what I've been told by hunky "Facebookers" (an interesting word now entering the language).

I'm not sure why I would need to know on a minute to minute basis that my best friend is entering the grocery store, feeling the melons, or watching a clean-up on aisle seven. I once coaxed my sister to post "I am still breathing" as her status. Writing on her wall, dozens of people expressed grave concern about her health. Did she have respiratory distress? Was she smothering? (It's unlikely she would be able to type while being smothered.)

All this having been said, it's benign as long as you don't click on the wrong link and get phished. It's the cyber equivalent of chatting to your neighbor across the fence while taking in the laundry. It keeps people talking, and that's a good thing in these mean and perilous times. I have to wonder, however, when we're going to reach the saturation point. Perhaps one day we'll simply crawl into our PCs while the real world, vegetable and mineral, just decays. It will be up to Keanu Reeves (a.k.a. Neo) to enter the Matrix and save us. Meow.