Facebook is the path to Krypton

Will Richardson posted an inter­est­ing link today. The link tells us that Facebook is grow­ing by 600,000 users a day and that a lot of those user are over 25. Many are over 55.

Thinking about how many peo­ple are jump­ing into social net­work­ing — which is, in a way, a sub­sti­tute for real world net­work­ing — got me think­ing about the planet Krypton, Superman’s homeworld.

If I’m remem­ber­ing my lore cor­rectly (and recent plot lines in the comic series may have changed this), Krypton was a bar­ren and cold place whose inhab­i­tants iso­lated them­selves in their homes, eschew­ing phys­i­cal con­tact with other peo­ple. Physical con­tact and even meet­ing in per­son was dis­taste­ful and only done when nec­es­sary. (See also E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”)

Is Facebook a gate­way to this? Will we become so dis­tanced from our nat­ural world, so lost in the vir­tual one that we for­get our con­nec­tion with the world around us and even­tu­ally let mad scientist/dictators destroy our planet, leav­ing only a sin­gle sur­vivor rock­et­ing toward safety on some dis­tant, hab­it­able world where he will grow up to become a cham­pion for truth and justice?

I’m just say­ing it’s pos­si­ble. That’s all.

Related posts:

1. Is “quit­ting Facebook” the new Facebook meme?
2. Facebook = FAIL
3. Bozeman police offi­cer resigns over com­ments he made on Facebook
4. Facebook will melt your brain
5. How to post arti­cles to the MSU News Service page on Facebook