Eleanor Bourg Donlan below writes a wonderfully curmudgeonly attack on Facebook, the strange vacuity that is the hit of the internet.  I, too, have some reflections on the Facebook fad, having been FB-ing for a few months now.

The first thing a new Facebook user notices is that there’s nothing there.  My first set of friends were the young 20-something actors who work for me, and who are crazy about it.  But when I joined, all that happened was that I kept getting bombarded by their “status updates”.  They would go something like this …

MINDY is no longer in a “relationship”.

                COMMENT:  Yeah, but I bet FRTG on the BTWB!

                MINDY:  Ha, ha.  Well, I may have spoke too soon.

                COMMENT:  Mindy, this is Jim.  I just poked you.  Did you get it?

                MINDY:  New update.  Change “no longer in a relationship” to well maybe.

                COMMENT:  Hi, Jim, this is Dawn!  When did you join?  Friend me!

“Mindy” (not her real name) was updating her status about eight times a day, and all of the news was about her tortured relationships – but instead of just saying, “I broke up with Dick and I’m dating Harry until lunch, at which point I will reverse the process, but then tonight Tom picks me up,” she would be obscure enough to achieve a kind of code – probably because her current and potential boyfriends were also on Facebook – making the updates both insipid and unintelligible at once.  Quite an achievement for any writer, if you think about it!

Beyond being mired in such pubescent news flashes (not unlike the TV news viewer), the new user notices that Facebook has an odd little trick up its sleeve.  Searching its top secret database, Facebook decides that, based on the friends you already have, there are others you probably know and want to add to your “friend” list so you can get their crucial updates.  Facebook then shows you pictures of these people – your potential friends.  But Facebook kept showing me pictures of people I did indeed know, and knew were Losers and Drug Addicts – people Facebook thought I should pal around with!  What, I wondered, does Facebook think of me?  Does Facebook have such a low opinion of my social life?  Does Facebook think I have things in common with these people?

But despite all of these flaws, there is something to be said about Facebook, for in its emptiness it is at least waiting to be filled.  Facebook is like the internet itself – a vast highway.  The highway is not at all interesting, but the places you go on the highway might be.  For it is actually possible on Facebook to add some substance.

For example, my friends are now interesting people, including Jeff Miller of the Curt Jester blog, Sean Dailey, editor of “Gilbert” magazine, and Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, who has 5,000 friends, and who uses Facebook to update folks on his battles against abortion.  Their status updates are all well worth the read.  Facebook is also an excellent tool for posting and sharing photos.  And best of all, you can play Scrabble on Facebook, as I’ve been doing with my friend actor Frank C. Turner, who lives in British Columbia, and who is the best Scrabble player I’ve ever met.  These international games go on for weeks, with each of us playing a word or two per day.

So Facebook is more medium than message, and if we work hard enough to provide the message the medium will support it.

Too bad Eleanor closed the page on Facebook.  Imagine what her acerbic and insightful status updates must have been like!  But instead we’ll just have to read them here.