The Medium: Facebook Exodus

For some people, photos on Facebook of wheelchair users having fun, dating, and living a normal life is enough to dispel stereotypes of people with disability (Utne Reader): http://www.newmobility.com/articleViewIE.cfm?id=11499

Matt Labash's "Down with Facebook" essay:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/256implp.asp

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/index.html?source=newsletter

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil." His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20FOB-onlanguage-t.html?ref=magazine

“What’s done cannot be undone,” moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke up in the 21st century, she would be pleased to discover that whatever can be done can be undone, too.

Or perhaps it just seems that way in the new social spaces we are carving for ourselves online. On popular Web sites devoted to social networking, innovative verbs have been springing up to describe equally innovative forms of interaction: you can friend someone on Facebook; follow a fellow user on Twitter; or favorite a video on YouTube. Change your mind? You can just as easily unfriend, unfollow or unfavorite with a click of the mouse. ...

Rewinding the tape of reality is an appealing metaphor in science fiction, unsurprisingly. Nancy Etchemendy’s young-adult novel, “The Power of Un,” features a middle-school student who operates a gizmo called “The Unner” to go back in time and undo past events. ...

It's not all about selling, I hope... Or was Facebook invented to meet the needs described in Post #48416?

A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/business/smallbusiness/12guide.html?em