Word: facebook
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...started long before the Internet existed, with the advent of answering machines. "People would call a phone when they knew the other person wasn't available to pick up," says Charles Steinfield, a professor at Michigan State University who co-authored a peer-reviewed study called "The Benefits of Facebook 'Friends.' " "It enabled them to convey information without forcing them to interact...
...Enter Facebook, which provides a constant flow of information via short updates from everyone a user knows: a distant cousin is glad he skipped the cheeseburger chowder; a colleague has a new book on sale; a close friend is engaged or newly single. Jenny and I, along with three of our childhood pals from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., learned that a dear old friend had ended her seven-year relationship through a Facebook status change. We expressed dismay, albeit through Facebook's IM feature, that we had to learn such potent information in this impersonal way. (See the best social networking...
...many users, Facebook somehow remains distinctly personal. Although social-networking sites typically encourage connections among strangers - like on MySpace, where people converge through common interests, or online dating, where the whole point is to greet new faces - Facebook is geared toward helping people maintain existing connections. The site serves as a self-updating address book, keeping users connected no matter their geographical shifts. "There are people from my past life that I never would have tracked through 10 job changes and 20 e-mail changes," says Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State and lead author of the Facebook...
...Perhaps this is the key. Jenny's online sociability and offline silence probably has less to do with digital retreating than time management. Facebook offers e-mail, IM and photo sharing in what Neill calls the "one-stop shopping" of online interaction. "It's not surprising to me that it's replacing other forms of communication," says Steinfield...
...still surprising to me, however, this combination of Orwell and WALL-E that has humans watching one another through computer screens and socializing in quasi-isolation. Neill says Facebook has brought her closer to her already close friends, whom she has little time to see because of kids and work. "I know more about them now than I did when I was in regular contact with them," she says...