I was back in Chicago for my cousin's wedding recently, and I had the occasion to have a pleasant lunch at the Palace (term used loosely) Grill on Chicago's Westside with my favorite Chicago shyster, Rabbi Meish (not a clergyman).
Chicago's Westside neighborhood was once the most dangerous slum in Chicago--and that's saying something. Today, while not gentrified, it certainly is a more pleasant place. Time changes things. No one questions whether or not neighborhoods are ephemeral. That's their nature. They change--for better or worse.
But what about social networking sites like Facebook? Is Facebook ephemeral? Or is it a permanent community that will span generations-changing surely--but always there, like the Westside of Chicago, through good times and bad?
While I'm on Facebook, my lawyer friend couldn't understand why anyone would waste their time with it. Frankly, I had a hard time making a case for it. Is Facebook like the CB Radio craze of the 1970s--a fun way to twist technology into a social networking pretzel? Will we look back in twenty years, and laugh at how we all had Facebook pages like CB "handles" or will those pages have grown into something so powerful that we can't imagine life without them?
I remember telling my mom in 1990, that I thought the Internet would be the most revolutionary communications tool to ever exist--that it would be my generations' television. That it would be to an essential part of our lives from hence forth. In response, she said she couldn't think of one thing she could do online. Even today, she rarely ventures online, but I think, if you asked, she probably would agree that I was on to something in 1990.
But that doesn't mean everything online has permanence. And so, I wonder, is Facebook ephemera?
[image by avlxyz]
