Facebook is the novel we are all writing

When MTV spanked popular culture with it's Real World series in 1992 I realized that reality TV (RTV) was not just a fad, like fondue or pleather, but a new genre that was here to stay.  Riding on it's coat-tails followed a multi-million dollar pursuit to interview and document the lives of the massively mediocre and dull.  While cat-walks spun orange into the new pink, RTV tailored the boring into the latest thrill.

Basically, the RTV phenomenon divides society into two groups; those who watch it religiously, and those who watch it in secret.  I don't have a television so I can't sling too much mud because I subscribe to the great and spacious building site of Facebook.  



Personally, speed-limits and taxes have felt more comfortable than FB at times.  But you can't fault the genius of it.  Conceived in a womb of the world's greatest of universities and fertilized by the deepest of pockets, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg wrote the algorithm (in answer to the myspace problem) and provided a forum for students to express themselves succinctly, outside of the classroom, to connect, collect, and organize the individual expressions of college life; from campus to campus, throughout academia, and beyond.  A buzz so contagious that by 1994, in less than a year, a new social network secured it's face within the books of history.


It's fairly straightforward to deactivate Facebook.  So feeling bold I took the plunge and suspended my account for a while.  My exit was so badly received that a visit to each of my friend's houses in the middle of the night and throwing rocks at their windows and spray painting farewell's all over their cars seemed a more civilized departure than the havoc I wreaked from a simple click of a button.  So to keep the peace I returned to Facebook and also to a wall splattered with the annoyances and cries from a posse abandoned.

Social networks are fueled by billions of tweets and narcissistic updates driven only by the need for people to broadcast their own uniqueness.  Pull the plug on that and the chaos which started in Egypt is only the beginning.