Facebook Nation?

No, this is not a post to announce my arrival to the Facebook Nation. On the contrary, I still remain ambivalent about signing up for the social network. I tend to be what most would call a slow-adopter. In the 80's, I didn't cave in and buy a Coca-Cola shirt until the latter part of the fad. Being somewhat of a miser, I don't jump in and buy the latest technology or gadget (unlike some others I know). I waited 4 years to finally watch Forrest Gump simply because everybody insisted that I just had to watch it. It's not that I'm so much a nonconformist, it's just that I tend to be very deliberate about what I choose to do. I just don't tend to jump in to the next wave of what's new - it's just not my personality.

And so it is with Facebook. I'm simply not certain that I'm quite ready to join a social network that threatens to bring back every era of my life on one page. I keep waiting for the fad to fade, but according to this piece by Michael S. Malone, that may not happen. Facebook appears to be one of those exceptions where the old axiom "but everybody's doing it!" is actually true (emphasis mine):

In the last year, Facebook, the social networking site to which you likely already belong, has seen its membership rolls triple in the last year . . .to a total of 300 million members. And, if those trends are continuing, Facebook today will add another 3 million members – that is, the population of a city the size of Berlin, Madrid or Buenos Aires – today.

Three hundred million members is a mind-boggling number. In terms of population, it would put Facebook on the list only behind China, India and the United States – and just above Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. It is almost as big as the entire population of the European Union, of sub-Saharan Africa, or South America. And, incredibly, it is equal to the entire population of the world in 1000 A.D.

In 1991, I learned about the dissolution of the Soviet Union on a service called Prodigy. Three years later, I was getting 3 CDs a week in the mail from a company called America Online (AOL) and the sing-song announcement "You've got mail!" for $19.99 a month. Fifteen years later, the Facebook Nation is the fourth largest "nation" in the world in terms of population? Absolutely mind-boggling.

Still, I'm not yet quite ready to jump on the bandwagon. I spend too much time online as it is, and with my tendencies I need to be careful. Things like Facebook could easily consume me. 300 million people notwithstanding, there is a world outside of the network. A world where the sun rises in brilliant reds and yellows, the deer race across the grass by the treeline, and people still talk and live face-to-face without a computer monitor between them.

But, the trend is obvious. Facebook indeed may very well rule the world. Just remember that the real world is not two-dimensional.