Is it nurturing our families and communities by bringing us closer together? Or is it a dangerous threat -- a technology that fosters isolation, anxiety and narcissism?
These two perspectives have been squaring off, even as Facebook: The Movie -- aka "The Social Network" -- vies for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and Facebook is credited with playing a key role in Egypt's mass protests. Along with MIT professor Sherry Turkle's new book "Alone Together," an intriguing treatise on how technology is warping relationships and undermining civic values, Facebook antis have found support in a widely circulated piece by Libby Copeland in Slate's DoubleX, which uses new research to argue that Facebook is making us less happy by encouraging us to compare our lives to the staged Hallmark moments of friends' newsfeeds.
Strangely lost in the debate is the fact that there is no single Facebook experience. We -- not Facebook -- determine who our friends are, how often we see their posts, how we engage with them, and the myriad other experiences that constitute "our" Facebook. We -- not Facebook -- have the agency here. Facebook is what we make it.
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