Facebook no more

There's a general unrest in the land of Facebook these days. I think Google+ may have unearthed it originally, but Facebook itself has done the best job of excavating it and polishing it off with its new changes--especially the unfinished mobile app. I mean, really, who accesses Facebook on their PC anymore? People are starting to wonder why they have a PC in the first place at this point... Until they have to write a paper or something. Though even then, you can hook a keyboard up to an iPad...

Remember the early days of the migration of social networking on the internet? When it first started taking off, first started being available to most households (insert sound of dialup here), there was the Bulletin Board Systems, rudimentary DOS-based chat rooms. People were content with these kind of things, basic conversations with mostly strangers about a variety of topics. Then they became overrun by trolls, and people wanted a personal touch. So the solution? Everyone learned HTML. At least everyone in my circle.

That's right, a lot of people had their own webpages on Angelfire or Yahoo or another free site. Sometimes they would help you make your website, but those weren't nearly as fun as making them yourself. Creating the little buttons in Paint that said About Me or My Friends. Uploading everything ten items at a time on the slow dial-up. Sitting back and relaxing and marveling at your genius. Linking to your friends' webpages and checking them out, too. And then came along a different kind of item: MySpace.

It was like everyone could have their own uniform webpage. You could change the background color, add a song that would automatically play on startup, but there was still the basic formula: You would make posts, long or short, and upload pictures, and then link to your friends' MySpace pages. Click on them daily to read their posts and look at their pictures. You could even use it for online dating if you preferred (and I did, once!). And then a strange thing happened... Everyone started vacating MySpace. Using something new called Facebook.

I didn't really like Facebook at first. I resisted. Microblogging didn't seem the way of the future. We had been conditioned by all the previous formats to be long-winded and expressive. We could rhapsodize about any given topic, though of course we all had our favorites. And yet, Facebook took hold. And alongside it, Twitter, which was even more microscopic. We were becoming a society that was addicted to the news bite, no matter how mundane. We needed the constant feed of what was happening in everyone else's life. Rarely was it earth-shaking or insightful. Triviality was the name of the game. By casting this global net for every acquaintance ever formed, we had made our world microscopic, a cesspool of narcissism that self-perpetuated.

And now Facebook is self-destructing. Google+ is waiting to pick up the pieces, but quite frankly, it's more of the same. We need something different. Something outreaching. Something global that will wake us up and shake us from our micro-communities. Allow us to break through to new insight, or at least new viewpoints. We have been minimized to the point that we cannot shorten our thought processes any further. Is the solution going back to blogging? Is it sites like livingsocial.com, that uproot us from our computer chairs altogether? I don't know, but I do know it's not going to be Facebook in disguise, no matter how much Google wants to think they've streamlined or improved the process.