Facebook Friends Forever

Facebook Deactivation: Facebook deactivation: we’ve all considered it at one point or another; but have you ever actually gone through with it? If so, did you reactivate your account later? Probably, right? That often seems to be the case with Facebook deactivation, it is a temporary thing, a momentary break from the oversharing and constant stream of information about all of your “friends.” As author Mary K. Moore writes near the end of her account of “quitting” Facebook, “Part of me knows that my sojourn is merely putting off the inevitable… dusk will arrive, and I’ll have to come in from the backyard eventually.” It’s kind of sad that this is where we are, that we’ve accepted social media as the norm, so much so that we now feel that being on a social network is a necessity of life, that it is inevitable, that we feel anxious when we are away from it for too long. Or on the other hand, as this Gawker commenter laments, others guilt trip you or take it personally if you remove yourself from social media networks. But who knows, maybe in time being on social media networks like Facebook will be a quaint thing of the past, something that future generations will look back on and study as the strange cultural fad of the Information Age. Every era demonstrates cultural ebbs and flows. There is always some kind of backlash against extremes, formation of countercultures that then become the norm and then new countercultures form and so on. The conservatism of the ‘50s gave way to the free love of the ‘60s. So maybe the oversharing of the awls will give way to a more reserved, more private era. Just maybe. HuffPo

Comic of the Day: For all you who ran out to get the new iPhone 4S. BuzzFeed