Ah yes, this sort of thing. Facebook, like the internet, like blogging, like twitter, like crowdfunding, like videogames, like books, like e-commerce, is not s

Ah yes, this sort of thing. Facebook, like the internet, like blogging, like twitter, like crowdfunding, like videogames, like books, like e-commerce, is not some crazy new universe, it's just a medium where human beings can do what they've always done, but perhaps in different ways. It doesn't change the underlying capability of humans for good or ill, nor does it force humans to act differently. If a drunk person initiates a fistfight with someone else in the parking lot after a football game most people are likely to place this event into the proper context, to put the responsibility on the individual primarily. But if the same thing were to happen under "more unusual" circumstances suddenly all logic flies out the window and people are more inclined to think those circumstances are somehow intimately related to the altercation. If someone kills someone over a video game, if people get into a scuffle after they run into each other on segways, or if some other drug is involved than alcohol, suddenly personal responsibility takes a back seat and moral panic rears its head. If a newspaper gets a story wrong that's one thing, if a blogger gets a story wrong suddenly it's a condemnation of all of internet journalism to its core. And here we have an example of people behaving badly and participating in perhaps human kind's oldest pass-time: horribly broken relationship behavior. And yet somehow all of this is special and unique and new because it happens on facebook, as though all of human history preceding facebook had been a bland parade of utterly normative relationship behavior. People are weird, sometimes in a good way sometimes in a bad way, and when that weirdness becomes evident on a new medium it implies nothing about that medium other than that it allows humans to act like they've always acted. P.S. This doesn't mean I think facebook is "good". There are lots of legitimate and even fundamental reasons to dislike or even hate facebook, but this narrative is not a particularly good critique of the platform.