[Healeys] Facebook, Healey List, and the Brave New World

[Editorgary at aol.com]

Never proposed that we should switch the Healey list to Facebook -- we're 
Baby Boomers on this list, in the vast majority I think, so there's no way 
that most of the folks here would ever agree. Facebook is on the other side of 
that great print world /internet world divide and most of us will never 
understand it, but will die before it matters whether or not we understand the 
phenomenon that's taking place.

My point was that this list was created and is maintained at great effort 
to serve a one specific shared set of interests of a group of people who 
could only otherwise communicate by meeting each other personally and then 
sharing information one piece at a time to one person at a time. Facebook, for 
all its flaws, does that a zillion times a day, with every user participating 
in his or her own specially tailored and infinitely responsive network.

There's nothing that says our generation has to participate, or even that 
we have to like the visible effects of what has taken place. But refusing to 
participate isn't going to change the fact that the change has taken place, 
and it is only starting (with the quant-jock created housing/financial 
debacle as one example) to have its effects. As the man once said: "you have sown 
the wind, and you will reap the whirldwind."   The interesting thing, of 
course, is that the millenial, or internet, generation enjoys the breeze.

Cheers
Gary