The death of Facebook

We are the Facebook generation. We are the generation of shameless voyeurs and exhibitionists. We peep into the lives of everybody around us, but we want to maintain complete control over our own electronic personas. We are ambitious and impressionable. We poke our social tentacles into every crack and corner, eager to suck up all that is damp and dirt, but we are too frightened by the unfamiliar environments to expose our physical selves.

Hence we crouch behind the face of the monitor-poking, prodding, graffiting the walls-using the distant void of the Internet as the ultimate refuge from social rejection.

It is easy for us to make "friends." Just click. Back. Click. No discrimination. It is even easier to maintain friends.

We are handed their cookie cutter interests and hobbies. We are told where they are from, what classes they are taking, what clubs they are in. We are even alerted to their birthdays for the perfunctory message on the wall. Whew.

For many, it is competition to see who has more friends. It is a measure of social prestige and status. Need an ego boost? Go and inflate the number of buddies! (It's amusing to check out the omnipresent rapport of the so-called student "leaders.") Oh the horror of not having a profile, or worse, having only a double digit social network.

"It doesn't mean that you are antisocial, or you are a bad person," Chris Hughes, one of the creators of Facebook, told The New Yorker. "But where are the traces of your existence in this college community? You don't exist-online, at least."

The youth of the 1960s defined counterculture. From the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley to the Civil Rights Movement in the South; from the psychedelic flower children of San Francisco to the Parisian strikers that nearly toppled the French government; students confronted traditional Western ideals and embraced new forms of religion, social organization and spiritual enlightenment.

We are revolutionaries and agitators of a different breed.

The expansion is risky. The further loss of chummy exclusivity and privacy is likely to cause an upheaval among its oldest and most loyal clients-the college students. If we are already angry that we have to share our network with high school siblings, how would we feel when Grandma or that eccentric uncle starts writing on our walls?

Yet this is all a part of the inevitable progression. The Facebook generation is growing up. As we graduate from universities and disperse into the world, Facebook has to follow us out of the hallowed walls of campus. As our physical networks change, our virtual networks naturally transform along. This is because, as Zuckerberg himself admitted at a technology convention, "there might not be any difference between what people are doing online and offline."

The growth of Facebook is then that of a gravedigger digging his own grave. Maturity is stripping away the very innocent quality that makes Facebook unique-the exclusive fraternity of shared classes, professors and experiences-and turns it into just another online public forum, of which there already exist many.

Allowing access from the general community would be the death of Facebook. The same dreadful end suffered by the Children's Revolution of the '60s when students grew up into complacent Baby Boomers. The cozy cocoon of virtual egos, friendship and agitation, dreamed up six score and 15 weeks ago by the wide-eyed kids, of the kids and for the kids, will perish from earth.

James Zou is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Friday.