A few thoughts that probably buck the trend around here: ‘”I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med st

A few thoughts that probably buck the trend around here: ‘”I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”’ Honestly, why is that unhealthy? I think there's probably more to this story, but it's not like it doesn't happen in real life without facebook. You hang with your friends, you exchange stories about someone you don't know, and then one day you meet them and someone mentions “by the way, this was the person we were talkin about when we said bla bla bla”. Yes, facebook probably makes it easier, but I don't find this to be “unhealthy” in the least. ‘“I wasn’t calling my friends anymore,” said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”’ I've heard this before. Honestly, I think it's because we're in this transition stage where somehow this feels less real than a phone call. I would argue that this is a real connection. These pictures and updates often communicate more than you necessarily would remember to in a phone call. The purpose of a phone call is different, the interactions there are different. It seems like if you're worried that you're not calling your friends anymore… You should start calling your friends again. I know I feel like I am exposed to more articles and jokes and opinions via facebook than I would if I weren't on it. I interact with people I'm not super-close with, and that's fine. To me, it's like HN, but with a different set of people posting stuff to it, people who are close to my interests in a way completely different from HN. It's more personal in some ways, and I feel more free to be myself in some ways, while I feel more constrained in others. It is, in short, the very definition of a different medium of interaction. I won't say the same things on facebook that I do on HN, and I won't say the same things on either of those that I will with my friends when we're having a drink. I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to shun facebook at all. But I think there are some common complaints about facebook that simply stem from a strange concept of what it is. Then again, I suppose if you're using it in a way that's harmful to you, and you can't figure out how to make it less harmful, it's probably a good idea to leave it altogether. By the way, I probably spend at least 15 hours a week using facebook. That fact doesn't particularly bother me. In the past, I've noticed this goes down when I have other stuff to do. Facebook is just something that happens more often when I have more spare time. If I really wanted to do something different with that time, I would (though there's a decent argument here for death by a thousand papercuts—or facebook visits).