Quotables

A friend of mine recently discovered (through email snooping) that her 13-year-old daughter was planning a forbidden mission to another city to meet up with a boy from Myspace. Was the boy a teenager? Was he safe? It was anyone's guess, so my friend decided to teach her daughter a lesson.

She created a fake profile for herself in Myspace, complete with a bogus photo and a list of hobbies. She messaged her daughter about a band they both liked, and over the next week they became firm online friends. The daughter bitched about her mother, confessed about her online boyfriend, and was soon on her way to a secret meeting with her new pal. The reaction, when the daughter found her mother waiting for her, wasn't pretty. She was horrified, wouldn't speak for a week… but she cancelled her assignation with the boy.

from Mary Wakefield's article I looked at her page - and felt like a pervert

"In my casual observation MySpace seems to be all about 'I am what I make/what I like' and Facebook is more 'I am who I know/what I do.'"

-- David Sturtz

There's some deep part of your brain that instinctively wants to make connections with other human beings. Even when you do something as superficial as click a button on a website to confirm that somebody you've already known for ten years is your friend, that bit of your brain experiences a little 'ping' of happiness.

This is why social networks like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook work. Once they've tricked you into signing up, you have to find everyone else you know who is also on the service and connect to them. When you run out of people to connect to, you have to tell everyone you know to get an account so you can connect to them again. Because it's fun. And it's fun because people are fun, even if they're people you see every day, and have no need to interact with over the Internet.

Eventually you run out of real friends to add. At this point you have three options:

1. Find some other feature of the site to keep you logging in
2. Gradually lose interest, returning every month or two to see if anyone else has added you
3. Radically lower your standards

-- Charles Miller, "On Social Networks" (Sept 14, 2007)

"i think the facebook is a chilly new robot and it makes having friends so easy that friendship hardly feels sincere. i'm trying to cut down." -- Mark M.

"Facebook is so endlessly social and inclusive it sometimes reminds me of one of those mega-nightclubs from the late ’80s (Palladium, the Limelight, etc.), only without the music, the alcohol, the drugs, the lights, the sweat, or — it must be said — the people."

-- Lucinda Rosenfeld