Face-to-Facebook

You know how skeptical I was about iPods? And cell phones? And just about every new piece of tricknology that comes out?
Goes triple for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. I mean, come on. Besides being completely redundant (there's nothing on Facebook that doesn't exist in a myriad of places elsewhere on the Web), the whole phenomenon fairly reeks of high school. Here's the popularity contest: people racking up hundreds of "friends" they wouldn't recognize if they ran into them on the street (but of course, that assumes people still go running on streets these days). You've got your juvenile applications like Send Hotness, which give you a nice superficial feeling of being superficially judged superficially "hot". And you also get to know the least action of any of your least friends: I swear, some people won't fart until they post it in their status line. ("Ken is Bisquicking his underwear.")
Ah, Ken, how do you know so much about Facebook if you claim to be so skeptical about it, hmmm?
Ahem.
See...uh...there were these three friends of mine. Real friends, not Facebook friends. Each from a different period in my life. And each one emailed me within a week, and each email basically said the same thing: why the hell aren't you on Facebook already?

Inside me there's this teenager. I don't let him out much: he's prone to embarrass me. I kind of locked him away at about the age of nine, which is when I decided I'd about grown up, and he's been aging ever so slowly in there since. He's been the source of every social mis-step, every awkward moment, every last misplaced affection I ever had. Anyway, he's about eighteen now, and just as prone to peer pressure as most people of that age. He perked up with each email, and eventually demanded to get on Facebook, just on a trial basis, you understand. Rational, grown-up Ken said sure, okay, no problem, we'll join up on this site and see how infantile it really is.

And so I joined up. And that was that. Now it's a daily staple, and if you came up to me and told me that I could only visit one website from now on, it's no contest which I'd choose.

So what happened? Simple. I started looking people up.

Over here's the guy I went to school with back in grade four. He was the Rubik's Cube champion for his age group when I knew him, and the closest thing to a friend I had at that age...one of the very few kids who didn't look at me and want to re-arrange my face.
And over there are a pair of twins who lived down the hall from my ex when she went to Humber College. Lovely, both of 'em. (Truth be told, I had a crush on them...nothing I let get out of hand, but my ex knew, which is why I never got the chance to say goodbye to them, and why I remembered their names lo these sixteen years.)
Here a cousin; there an ex-boss; and here's my wife's matron of honour. Friends I met through other friends: a friend I've never met, but whose blog I read religiously; three aisles full of co-workers. (My store employs fewer than 100 people, and 77 of them are on Facebook.)

And while I'm looking people up, people are looking me up. One day I got a message in my Facebook inbox from a girl I'd never heard of in my life. She asked me if I had gone to Byron Northview Public School in the mid-eighties. I had. Twice, actually. I told her so, also confessing her name didn't ring any bells. Whereupon she told me she had been a grade ahead of me, and proceeded to detail an awful lot of (accurate) things about my grade five self. I didn't know whether to be flattered or alarmed. By that weird online alchemy, we've since become friends of a sort.
Then today: Craig Robertson.
Craig Robertson: my closest male friend for a while. He was a couple of years behind me, but even in grade nine played trumpet at a professional level. At some point after I moved away from London, he melted out of my life. Friends come in and out like busboys in a restaurant, have you ever noticed that?

Okay, so I've got friends on Facebook. So what?

Well, there's Scrabulous...I've played eleven games of Scrabble online, winning six and having fun even when I lose. There's an application called "Books iRead", which offers the opportunity to browse the entire Amazon.com catalogue, review anything you've read and read the reviews of others. There's "iLike", which does the same for music and goes one further: type an artist's name and you'll find out if they're on tour, where they're playing any given night, and you're even able to buy tickets. And this is anybody, not just teenybopper bands. You've got all of YouTube at your disposal to troll for music videos. And so on and so forth. There are groups a la Usenet for everything under the sun, popular or obscure. That's like a magnet to me: search my name under Google Groups and you'll very quickly find out what happened to the last eighteen months of my aborted university education.
In short, Facebook is the entire 'Net in microcosm. There are truckloads of rough, but more than enough diamonds in there to justify daily sifting.

The Internet: Boon or Bane?

The easy answer is 'both', of course. Like every tool we've invented, the Net can be used for good or ill. The extent to which it is ill-used is not its fault, any more than it's a car's fault when someone is run over.
So many people--overwhelmingly older people, say, 45 and up--believe the Internet is a vast shadowy jungle, where monstrous things lurk, ready to tear out your soul and eat it raw. They are right...in part. The "World" part of "World Wide Web" is literally true: the 'Net is much like our Earth, civilized and urbane in many areas, wild and insane in many others.
People young enough to hear the word "mouse" and not think of a rodent have a different view. They're intimately familiar with their own little hamlet on what used to be called the "Information Superhighway"....and familiarity only breeds contentment in their elders. They're bored; they want to explore, and the dark places have an undeniable allure. So they poke and prod, and the more reckless of them are claimed, in one way or another, by the spiders that do lurk in the web.
When the Net was birthing, optimism ran high: here was a tool that could be used to connect people, to facilitate truly global perspectives...ultimately to save humanity from itself. Before this thought had been fully articulated, pornography and worse had taken root--and the soil of the Net is fertile indeed. We all know the majority of Net traffic is connected with smut.

Of course, it's an even bet anything "we all know" is wrong. Lo and behold, according to The Straight Dope, while sex is indeed popular, it ranks well behind music and (surprisingly, to me, at least) travel as a search item.
It's true that hardcore porn is trivially easy to discover online. Before my spam filters evolved into things that actually worked as advertised (I haven't received a single spam email in I can't recall how long), I often used to get such gems as "Suzie And Her Horse" and "Watch Jenna Take It All" delivered unsolicited into my Inbox on a near daily basis.
But then, it's trivially easy to find just about anything online: old friends, new friends, job opportunities...if you're inclined towards skullsweat, you can mine the minds of millions and come away with the equivalent of a Master's degree in nearly any field you can imagine, all for the cheap-and-ever-falling price of a high-speed connection.

It's often asserted that, as teen culture continues to migrate online, attention spans are rapidly shrinking. An article in today's Globe and Mail notes that although teenage television time is decreasing (like that's a bad thing?), the few dramas still watched include Lost and 24, both of which feature long and complex story arcs, proving that youth are willing to pay close attention under certain circumstances. Teenagers I know think nothing of carrying on six or more online conversations simultaneously, a juggling act I, frankly, envy, even as I find myself questioning the point of it all.

For every child predator emboldened by anonymity and easy access, there are many nice, natural, normal people who met online and are now in nice, natural, normal relationships. Much is made of the possibility of deception, especially concerning one's physical appearance: but as technology evolves into permitting online video and audio conversation in real time, this is rapidly becoming a moot point...in the process arguably eliminating the appeal of an online relationship for people like my younger self, who lacked self-confidence and had to win people with words alone.

For every al-Qaeda cell recruiting online, there are organizations like Humanity's Teamdoing the same, trying to foment peace and understanding. You say you can go online and get a step-by-step tutorial on how to make a pipe bomb? You can do the same in any library--and more to the point, you'll only find out how to make a pipe bomb if that's something you were interested in doing in the first place.

Culture, and the Internet so integral to it, is simply evolving. It's natural for many people to regard evolution as frightening, since it forces contemplation of unknown futures. But no matter how far or how fast the Internet evolves, it's important to remember: even though it has its sharp edges (or perhaps because it does), the 'Net is merely a tool.