Interesting, Blaise - in my case, I know very few of my FB friends in person - ditto twitter - I’ve never met them :) And most of the people I know have moved on from FB. The most common comments I hear about it now from my circle is that people haven’t been on it “in months”.

That’s the sort of recommendation I do find useful in the context of Facebook.

Also, maybe I just have more friends or more active friends using Facebook, but I don’t find it boring at all. It’s easy for most people I know to get sucked in and spend hours looking through content their friends have uploaded. I find the news feed preferences extremely useful, and I’m subscribed to a few of my friend’s feeds through my RSS reader (posted items, notes..).

I mean, there’s always room for improvement, but in the demographic I’m familiar with it seems pretty hard to find people who would say Facebook is boring. (Stupid, maybe. Addictive, probably. Boring, no.)

Just my two cents though…

Let’s consider the larger context of what’s happening, and why what has gone before seems boring in such a short period of time.

Facebook is useful not for what it does, or what it could do. It is useful as an evolutionary exemplar in the move from the broadcast mentality to the UCaPP mentality. Like all the other examples during this peak of the nexus phase we’re traversing, Facebook will hand off to the next big thing, that will hand off to the next big thing afterwards. Collectively, these all help to reshape the cognitive environment in which my children, and my future grandchildren will make sense of a world that becomes ever more distant from that of my own grandparents. Each stepping stone by itself is nothing special in the large scheme of time; collectively, they create a fascinating and remarkable path to the future, as such changes have done in epochs long passed.

In particular, Facebook creates multiple connections among multiple ways of interacting among people. Any particular valence connection is not supremely dominant (ie. having some sort of authority or dominance over any other). As some of us saw in the Chris Avenir vs. Ryerson episode, being administrator does not carry with it authority or responsibility in the conventional sense of being accountable to some other, even higher authority. Rather, we learn that our conventional notions of leadership, authority, membership, connection, and identity creation are all very different than the modernist world in which you and I were socialized would have us believe. Ryerson administrators had a tough time with this; thankfully they made as right a decision as they could under the circumstances.

Of course, these thoughts apply not only to Facebook, but to other artefacts of the UCaPP world, such as those mentioned above, Wikipedia (and the other Wiki-thingamabobs), and… well, you probably know more of them than I do, given the location in which you sit, and the folks you mesh around with.

All of these - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wiki-stuff, Second Life, Amazon, Google - all of them, are *content* insofar as they are functional aspects of an environment that defines and creates the conditions of Ubiquitous Connectivity and Pervasive Proximity. (In other words, to coin a phrase, the medium is the message). You think this stuff is advanced and changes the world? Quite literally, we ain’t seen nothing yet: think back to the world as it was about 100 years ago, and then set sights for 100 years in the future. That’s when, in my not-so-humble opinion, our world will be truly settled into the age of electric communication.