One thing I have seen since I delved into the passively perilous world of Facebook is something I would refer to as the "flattening" of online relationships. People you are close to "in real life" have the same accessibility and visibility to the user as people with whom you have a chronologically distant, or proximitely tenuous relationship with.
On one level, this is quite appealing - it can be nice to catch up with people you haven't been in touch with, see what they respond to, what their current interests are. But it also tends to promote artificiality....that a comment from someone you really don't care much about resides beside a comment from someone you do.
A life is composed disproportionately of the now, and the idea that an online now can be effectively and realistically cobbled together with commentary and "likes" from people with whom you don't have anything in common reeks of falseness and forced intimacy. A bit like being trapped in an elevator with randomly assigned characters from your life, present and past, and wondering which one in a crisis you may have to trust your survival on. And they are simply chosen because they post alot on this silly app.
It is both a curiously effective tool...but also a circumscriber of false community, and I must admit I find myself surprisingly suspicious of it, and vaguely contemptuous of it. I wish to define my own life.
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