The Age of Facebook

Awhile ago, I joined Facebook. When you first join, you have very few or no "friends". I wondered what all the fuss was about. But gradually you find people from your present and past lives, and discover other people you know on their friend lists. And so it grows.

As I add friends from my high school and college years in the 70s and 80s, I see that many of us are fairly new to this. I only note this because back in 1982-1983, one of my college roommates bought a primitive personal computer, Computer Science was on our class schedules, and it felt like we were the generation that would fully incorporate these devices into our daily lives.

Of course most of us have been using email for years, but this social networking through Facebook and LinkedIn appears to just now be rapidly spreading through those of us in the middle of our lives. Our children embraced it fully through MySpace years before we did.

I like making contact with old friends. But because it is fun, easy and free, somebody somewhere will see it as a threat to national security or to morality, and do their best to put a stop to it.

By the way, John McCain does not use email and does not use the World Wide Web. Yet he claims to understand how the world works, quite a claim for anyone. China has more internet users than the United States, most of them under 25 years old. Terrorist networks use the Internet. How can he understand the world if he doesn't understand how people communicate and share information? As Jon Stewart remarked, he may have work to do to get the "whippersnapper" vote.