Facebooking:The Love and Hate

Remember the pre-Web personal diary? It had a lock on it, and after writing your thoughts about the day, it stayed tucked in a drawer. You talked about dreams and disappointments and school and love, and sometimes you culled it for phrases in the love letter you agonized over for a week before leaving it in the mailbox or locker of your interest. The last thing you wanted was for someone else to read it, at least not until the beloved saw it and said, "Yes."

Back in the old days, love wasn't social, it was private. Communication, not to mention courtship, seemed to take a long time. Hours of contact with the loved one alternated with days alone with your longing. Except for a close friend or two, you kept it secret until you were established as an "item," and even then you maintained the border between private exchange and social identity as a couple. The medium of love -- the letter, the quiet walks, the rose, the kiss -- remained between you and your interest, and you didn't reproduce it for others. When you were apart, solitude hurt, but it made the time together all the more precious.

Today, with the spread of social media, the pain of separation is over, and so is the exclusivity of love.

As Facebook gets ready to go public and huge dollar amounts are discussed -- a $100 billion valuation, $5 billion in hoped-for sales, $100 per share, $1 billion in profits in 2011 -- CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others have a very specific vision of the future. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and all the other social media services coming and going are about changing, fundamentally and forever, the very nature of human experience. They want to socialize everything.

Mark Bauerlein