the redemptive gift of the "meme from hell'

Some good articles recently about Facebook..

like

Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies

and

Facebook: An Entertaining Saboteur

But on the front page of the Fresno Bee today was a helpful piece by John Timpano of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It deals, in part, with what some call the "meme from hell"

You send your "25 Random Things" chain-letter-style to 25 friends, and they fill it out and tag 25 others, and ...

And soon Facebook — a virtual living room where people hang out and tell everyone else what they're doing and thinking — is awash with personal revelations, admissions, info once kept private.

Facebook turned five Feb. 4. Sometime in mid-January, "25 Random Things" became a wildfire fad there.

Many have called Web lists such as "25 Random Things" "narcissism...But Facebook users and experts are saying: not so fast

Of course, ego is involved. But "25 Random Things" is a product of the information age. And that age is simply different from what went before.

If they are right, "25 Random Things" reveals a decisive shift in our society, and there's no going back. Many of us — younger, mostly — take a distinctive view of private and public, in which a permanent, always-connected audience trades personal, even intimate, information as part of having friends and being social. That hyperconnected life is here to stay. Call this narcissism, but it might be that the train left and you weren't on it. link

This all reminded me of Earl Crep's thoughts on public/private space, and my experience being

"Uncle Ernie at Uncle Harry's"..

The changes are here to stay...if I hear one more reference to the"evils of postmodernism," or Facebook being inherently evil, I may have to..

Uh, I have already done it.

Yes, I condescended to post one of those "25 random things about me."
I just couldn't tag people, it's against my religion. And I had to call it something diferent:
16 (not 25) top secret items about one of your favorite people
(And I felt a bit better about accepting the assignment to post "Top 25 Teaching Tips,"
especially as the tagger was an esteemed professor..will post that soon).

Maybe Chuck Colson is next..