Earlier, Dave Weigel wrote a great post about why he doesn’t cover Sarah Palin’s twitter feed or her facebook posts. He uses the opportunity to chastise the rest of the press to behaving as subservient to Palin when their relationship should be the opposite.

It seems now that Andrew Sullivan found the post and is using it to continue his crusade against Palin despite contradicting the spirit of the post by continually posting her nonsense tweets on his blog. He defends his actions by saying it’s his responsibility to “keep tabs on the lunacy.” That might be more compelling if he hadn’t posted less than a day ago one of her tweets verbatim and without comment.

I’m no fan of Palin, but Sullivan’s continued coverage of her is more tiring than anything else; maybe it’s because Sullivan has bit into this particular piece of meat so fervently, or maybe it’s because of the Trig pregnancy conspiracy theory he likes to push on occasion, but every time he starts to talk about Palin I zone out. Luckily, Weigel is still covering her, and doing so without calling her out as a sign of the apocalypse.

John August wrote about the changes occurring in society and culture and personality that the internet and online life can introduce. He’s generally more enthused about facebook and twitter and the like than I am — though I go through cycles regarding this and am shifting towards usage again, I think — but he raises a couple interesting points which I grazed by in my post about facebook but, naturally, he gets the point across much better:

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.

The world is getting smaller. With the advent of the internet, information that used to be far away and troublesome to obtain is available within a few minutes in your own home. And now, with the advent of social networks any information you need about your friends is available just by checking their blog, or their twitter page, or their facebook page, or any number of online sources for the intimate details of their life once left to their close network of friends.

There’s a bit of a paradox here. I joined facebook primarily because I wanted to catch up with old friends I don’t talk to much anymore. But for the most part, this can be done passively. I add them as friends and when I go to write on their wall, I come across a tidy aggregation of their hobbies, their interests, the music they like, the movies they like, what schools they’ve gone on to, what jobs they’ve held, and much more information. So before I even ask them how things are going, I’ve received the answer.

Beyond this, any answer to a question asked through facebook is automatically tainted with more forethought than that from a private conversation. That response can be read by anyone you’ve deemed a “friend,” a loaded phrase given the hundreds or thousands of “friends” you can amass through social networks. A facebook conversation has a very different dynamic than that of a real conversation.

Because of this, I’ve never found myself enthralled with facebook. Keeping in touch with dozens of former friends is an empty effort to me. I’d much rather cultivate the few good friendships I have in real life. Obviously, you can develop more substantial relationships through facebook, as you would in the real world, but there’s no real incentive to me. In general, friends you’ve lost touch with weren’t lasting friends. Whether it’s because you changed or they changed or you ran out of things to say to each other, friendships die for a reason. Trying to rekindle them through facebook isn’t likely to succeed.

Which I guess is why I barely ever visit facebook anymore. That initial burst of regained connections has faded away. Obviously, this depends on the person. I’m not anti-social per se, but I’m certainly not comfortable in highly social environments which is why I tend to avoid them.

So my intended use of facebook is not what most people use it for, but even excluding that facebook is not a replacement for more direct communication. Whether it’s face to face, or on the phone, or through instant messaging direct communication, that direct connection is needed for friendships to be anything more than acquaintances.