Facebook definitely serves a purpose; keeping me informed about far flung friends, providing an appropriate forum for personal messages aside from my work email, and allowing me to indulge my penchant for absurd Somali Pirate references in my status updates.
That all changed this past weekend. Suddenly, the criminal behavior I had casually trivialized due to the absurdly anachronistic notion of pirates swashbuckling away in these modern times revealed itself as simply brutal, ugly criminal behavior. Of course, it always had been but I had allowed the distance to abstract it and render it vaguely irrelevant and punchline worthy.
Initially, I thought I could just shuffle from Somali Pirate based updates to Pittsburgh Pirates based updates but growing up a Phillies fan in the era of Stargell and company makes that impossible. In the grand scheme of things, this quandary is a truly minor issue, but prior to Facebook, this issue didn’t exist.
When technology changes, it doesn’t mean much. But when technology changes behavior, those changes mean far, far more.