I'm not sure whether it says something of my generational standpoint or my lack of a social life that I use Facebook for little other than seeing what my high school/college friends look like these days. Little of column A, little of column B most likely.

It's funny, Facebook came to fruition when I was right in the middle of college, so you'd think I'd be in the sweet spot in terms of target audience. But out of the categories of people I see actively using Facebook- people a generation older than me who use it to post pictures of their kids/talk about their kids (keep in mind, I have a kid, I just don't really think to use Facebook this way), people a generation below me who use it to post pictures of themselves in fun situations, and people in any generation seeking to promote their enterprise/live show/new book etc.- neither I nor my friends fall into any of them. So I encounter this situation where, out of all the activity I see on Facebook, almost none of it is generated by my close friends, who all at this point live across the country from me and all keep up via the more "traditional" methods- e-mail and phone.

I'd worry that the implications point to me being a total social cockroach if I hadn't heard the same exact thing from a good portion of my cohorts. Either way though, I guess what I should pull from this is that although I don't personally pull anything of immediate value from the Facebook experience, maybe other people in other situations pull quite a lot from it, so who am I to criticize too vocally. To my original point, though- whether you think Facebook is great or Facebook is the devil, it's still weird to argue that it's totally necessary, as the Atlantic authors seem to be arguing.

If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, you'd probably go back to organizing a quick football game via group e-mail, my landlord would go back to sharing pictures of her kids via Picasa or her wallet (totally fine, they're cute kids), and I'd go back to waiting until awkward class reunions to find out how much more successful my former classmates are than I am (a lot, generally speaking). Can you imagine a world without banks? Not quite the same thing.