People talk all the time about how Facebook makes people narcissistic or whether or not heavy users tend to be happier than the general public. Then I often hear on the news discussions about research questioning whether Facebook friends are really friends at all. That's old news that I'm not going to write about. What I have noticed and find very interesting now that I have around 650 “friends” is that it gives me a peek into what’s going on in each of their lives. It’s not just what they’re doing at any given moment but the things they like, their political beliefs, which friends they associate with the most, their photography skills or lack thereof and many other things that I would never have known about them. But what makes it all crazy to me is that it comes up in chronological order at the exact moment that anything happens. I know for instance that John went to the Corner Bar 3 minutes before Julie took a picture of her baby. Of course, if you have a lot of friends that post often, some posts get pushed off your screen by others' more recent posts. It's hard to keep up with so many people anyway.
Since I think too much, I expand from that and I realize that instead of 650 people, there are 6 billion to consider. All of them are not on Facebook, but they all have thoughts, interests, activities that are happening almost simultaneously. It boggles my mind almost as much as the size of the universe does. Facebook is fun but it is powerful stuff when thought about from a philosophical perspective. (Perhaps God had the original Facebook account.) It’s beyond human comprehension, even if there is only one planet in the universe with life on it. (And we all know the chances of that are astronomically small.) I think I’ll go post a status update on Faceook that I need to take a nap to rest my mind. And you'll know exactly when I do it and what happened right before and right after I do it because... you need to know this.
+ Atul
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