Shed Lights On Your Better Side I think Facebook is a cultural phenomenon of the sort that deserves some serious study. Serious, seriously.

I was just reading a story (something longer than a status update, something shorter than an essay) that one of my friends posted about nighttime animal invaders in her garage, a semi-entertaining bit where she talked about being confronted with the choice of snuffing out the life out of a raccoon. There were eight or so comments that got condensed so that I could only read the last two, and these last two were so out of context that I clicked on all of them to read what got people there. So this thread talks about chickens dying, some other miscellaneous nocturnal rodent adventures, and then around number five there's one stuck in there from her sister-in-law who talks about how her father, my friend's father-in-law, has been in a coma for two days and is going to die anytime and she'll call her when it happens.

So. My questions are many, but mainly: why did she write such a personal thing there? Why would a matter, literally, of life and death be inserted inbetween people laughing about raccoons? Why are so many people getting to be so comfortable talking about the most private and important things so casually in such an open forum?

Which is ironic I guess coming from someone writing a blog in a world where blogs exist to talk about private things. But this feels so different somehow. I don't know. Maybe it isn't.

Now in the interest of continuing the non-private tradition, my children are practically in college since the second to the last time I wrote. Click for bigger pic.


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