There is a passage in The Social Network when Facebook co-creator, Mark Zuckerberg, says the servers serving the site and its 500 million friends must stay up. If they go down, he says, Facebook goes down and so does its credibility and quite possibly its future.
Well, this morning Facebook went down. It’s still down, at least for me. So, do I feel dispirited, distraught and deprived? No. I love Facebook but I am not addicted to it or reliant on it. For me it just serves as another way of keeping in touch with friends new and old. It doesn’t teach me anything or otherwise enrich my life and I can see why some don’t understand Facebook or its popularity and others openly despise, fear or simply ignore it.
But it’s there. There to share.
It’s there with its zillions of photos of drunk teenagers making silly finger signs, trash-talking students, stupid surveys, myriads of ads and invitations to parties at Castor Bay. Facebook can be stupid and stupefying.
But it’s also there for families and friends to share, to chat, and to upload photos, thoughts and memories in a manner that mail—even email—cannot accomplish.
I have heard some elderly folk lament the lack of personal contact and somehow blame Facebook for that. Well of course families and friends are different these days. Only it seems in Hamilton do they still stick together, picking on their banjos. The rest of us, as my own family attests, are spread throughout the world. Facebook is a way of bringing us together, keeping us together.
So there are two faces to Facebook. On balance I would have to venture the opinion the world is better off for having it.
Even if Facebook is still down on me; I am not down on it.
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