Behold, our beloved mechanisms of fear and desire, doom and delight! How they dance and sing in ways that make us giggle like obese children at the county fair, like drunken bears let loose at the campground. How they make us so very happy, horny, powerful like gods, and then turn right around and kill us dead. Ain't it a bitch?
Throughout history, the same. Not 48 hours after Alex Bell invented the very first telephone, his mistress rang him up for a fine Victorian booty call at 2 a.m., and his wife answered and she freaked the hell out and killed the cheating bastard in his sleep. True story! You can Google it!
Witness, won't you, the great and bizarre era of the great and bizarre Facebook. It has become terribly real. It has moved from silly novel dorky sorority-girl hookup bubblegum pop, into something darker, harder edged, lethal.
Like the iPod, like basketball shoes, like God, Facebook has changed cultural position, not because 15 million people use it to post bad poetry or talk about their love of "Mad Men" and Lady Gaga, but because Facebook -- and its brethren MySpace and Twitter (and email and SMS and etc) have become one of those mechanisms, a means and mode of true love, deep pain, and yes, very real death.
I use Facebook mostly to make bad jokes to folks who aren't in the room with me, sorta like here. I've been in danger from those all my life. Nothing much has changed except I have a lot more email to deal with.
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