by Eli Andersen

Sound the alarms! According to multiple reports, Facebook is declining in the U.S. and Canada. What! How can that be? I just uploaded seventy-five pictures of my dog asleep on the couch, and even reassured everyone, on my Wall, that my trip to the dentist was a success (complete with photos of the parking lot, the reception desk, me sitting forlornly in the waiting room, and post-op, at lunch—the sweet potato fries got four Likes!).

Yes, we know it's good for networking—Facebook that is—and we also know that it has become such a default life of sorts for so many of us, that hours can fly by while we study the lives of people we haven't seen or spoken to since high school, and in turn, announce the details of our own lives to. And is there anything more ridiculous (seriously, people) than getting a friend request from someone who doesn't at least message you even a little bit to say hello—to at least recognize the fact that you haven't actually communicated in over a decade? It's actually quite arrogant—like they're saying, "Here, look at my life—but I don't want to look at yours." I confirm so many people, and still never talk to them. I now just have this somewhat intimate, though oddly eerie, sightline into their day-to-day lives. And guess what? I'm still not interested! Yeah, we joke about it, but it's true. If I was that interested in still talking to you, I'd STILL BE TALKING TO YOU. I assume you've looked at all of my pictures (who knows), as I have yours, and quite honestly, that often does it for me. Now I know what you look like twenty years later—kids, animals, vacation pics, at some sporting event, out at some club, the star of your own life…zzzzzz—maybe I'll actually remember your name if we see each other on the street some day.

Okay, okay... let's retrace our steps for a minute. I actually do appreciate being "found" or friended by certain people. Life is short and fast; you lose track of a lot of things in the translation, including some pretty special folks. The irony of Facebook, and perhaps part of the reason for its recent decline in North America, is that after a certain amount of friends are collected, users have so many people to follow and/or communicate with, that they don't really communicate with anyone anymore, other than through updates. And who needs more updates? We're bombarded with news, sports, entertainment, sex, and fashion updates all day long. It all sort of becomes white noise, including these once-coveted "re-connections" we established on FB. So, and I'm just thinking out loud here, is Facebook's greatest flaw the fact that the bigger it gets, the more meaningless it becomes?

FT Tech Hub, among many, reported last month that between May and June, though activity still grew by 1.7% overall (mainly because of gains in places like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Indonesia), Facebook lost 6 million members in the U.S. and 1.5 million in Canada. Losses were also reported in England, Norway, and Russia. Insidefacebook.com acknowledges that, though such a revelation certainly can't be branded a trend just yet, the data (combined with abnormal growth patterns as of late) is a bit "unusual.

"I'm reminded of a quote by author Olin Miller: "We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.

"I think about this all the time. It might not even be a case of "not caring" about people as much as it is that I simply only have enough time to do the things I do and share time with a fairly exclusive group of friends, family, and associates. So maybe FB is a way for us to merely say to the rest of our personal world: ‘Sup people, here's what I did today. Or maybe it's a way for all of us to exercise this not-so-subtle "right to know" construct that has seemed to invade our collective social landscapes. The rise in social media and digital information has certainly re-shaped what we "think" we should be allowed to know about everyone and every thing, and we're showered with the details of so many things now, on a daily basis, that our perspectives have become distorted—ushering in a certain quiet demand for transparency on so many levels in our society (including social networking) that we're all equally guilty members of the "entitlement generation."

There's also another theory out there— in relation to FB's recent wobble. It's losing its coolness. Huh? Think about it. Everything ends. Every empire falls (often for reasons that seem quite avoidable in hindsight). And even though we live in a country where certain entities have been deemed fail-proof, I think we can all agree that such a designation is a load of crap. Even though the banks (and their tributaries) were deemed such (and rescued shamelessly), didn't they at least fail the American people, if nothing else? So, how could Facebook lose its coolness, and how might that be contributing to an early threat of failure? Simple. For the same reason I lose interest in my little page (just one page out of almost 700 million), vast swaths of users will also inevitably lose interest in theirs. Oversaturation. Too many people. And more specifically, too many old people. Ouch. Yep. Facebook, by becoming ubiquitous, is signing its own death certificate. Who likes crowds? Who likes standing in line, or being put on hold? And the realm of digital advertising follows around the young people of the world like love-struck puppies. When the young people decide that Facebook isn't cool anymore, because there are too many old people on it, you can bet your interface they will go elsewhere, and advertisers will follow. How old is too old? Well, let's just say that you'll know Facebook isn't cool anymore in the same way you found out MySpace wasn't—when it gets swallowed up by something else—the proverbial party down the street that slowly pulls all of the people out of your party. Next thing you know, you're down the street, too. Besides, young people don't want to know about their uncle's vacation plans, their parents' date night, or their teacher's child's horseback riding lessons. That stuff isn't cool, and it has no place in a young person's endless current of already-useless information.

But, for the same reason teenagers want to be dropped off two blocks from the movies, the rest of us don't like to have to shout to be heard, or sit in traffic, or wait for a table. The more people, the less personal anything is—the less valuable the venue in which the people exist—in this case, Facebook. After all, the average age of FB users is 38 – 44. Which, you might say, disputes this argument. But it's all part of the same debate: eventually, it will get stale, and dated; people's lives won't be as intriguing to us anymore because they all look the same. And don't kid yourselves; social networking is a young person's game. Just try to pry that cell phone from your disconnected teen's fingers and witness, at least for a couple of minutes, the life come back into his eyes, as the panic over not being able to text five hundred times in the next few hours truly starts to settle in like soul-crushing magma. Kids these days are wired to this form of interaction in a disturbing way, and at ever-increasing speeds and volumes. Gone are the days of apathetic teens ignoring their parents because that's simply what teens do; nowadays, kids don't just ignore their parents, they ignore everything and anything within the vicinity—eyes and fingers glued to an apparatus that stands as a modern symbol of how our technology is making us dumber.

Every generation after mine (Generation X), won't know life without total entertainment—life without the option to completely distract oneself with any number of endless devices or websites or games or fingertip communication—won't know life with the option of merely sitting still, enjoying the tranquility of the moment, when that moment simply represents nothing for now.

The other side effect of this era, and all the eras after, I assume, is that its many members will grow up with a completely distorted and off-base concept of what is special, what is unique, what has ultimate value—and how they inevitably fall into those categories. What we might end up with (and I use "might" because I'm scared of the truth) is a major part of an entire generation merely content with being led—led by whatever marketing machine tells them to go here or there—followers who have neither the motivation to fulfill their potentials, the insight to broaden their horizons, or the wherewithal to break free from the bubble within which they've allowed themselves to become confined.

My revolving concern is twofold: how long is it going to take these young people to pull themselves from this experiential haze, and how is the future of this country going to be affected by this massive group of people who can't draw from life experience because they've ignored so much of it along the way? Let me guess: "We've been saying that about our young people for decades; every generation is scared to death that the next generation is too clueless and will run the country into the ground." Well, no generation was like the generation I'm referring to. Just like my generation isn't just a few steps to the right or left of our parents—we're worlds apart, because of technology, and access to concepts and procedures that can't possibly be woven back in to the groups that preceded us. And my group didn't walk around in anywhere near the stupor—near the disengagement—I see in Generation Y—via digital gadgetry. Ironically, this group feeds social networking juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter.

As I write this, I'm looking down the block at the Sears Tower—Chicago. It's nearly forty years old, and stands a little over 1,700 feet, with the antennas. If it were to tumble over, as horrible as it would be, we could grasp that—it's tangible. We saw it built; it has a recorded birth, a lifespan, and a purpose. We saw it go up; we know its history. If it were to fall, we'd have a wealth of physical memory to associate with its demise. And we'd use that pool of knowledge to help ourselves comprehend the disaster—to pull through it. It would be the end of an era, and the symbol of that era, by crumbling, would be the period at the end of the sentence.

But the Internet is virtual; Facebook is digital—non-physical. Yes, it consists of millions of people visiting a specific place, but the place doesn't actually exist, and if it crashes to the ground—if the era of Facebook comes to an end, what would symbolize its passing, other than the mass exodus of almost a billion people to another similar site? And what does that say about the value of Facebook, and moreover, the value of the Internet?

I was asked today if I thought the Internet was dying. This question paralleled the overall Facebook conversation that a lot of writers, especially in big cities, are mulling over. Of course not—is my answer. The Internet is changing, evolving, and certainly expanding. It's just that the Internet changes and evolves so rapidly, most of the people "on the ground" barely get a chance to notice the specifics—we just know that it's not quite like it was, but we're not sure how to explain it. Like in life, things come and go, thrive and then die out, rise and then fall. The Internet has evolved over twenty years to pretty much look and feel like our physical lives—and it interacts with us, and we it, in a way that allows for a mixture between realities. And all of this has happened pretty much in two decades—a shocking speed of growth and adaptation. Within that time period, millions and perhaps billions of entities have come and gone while it grew, just like in life. But life has come along over the course of billions of years—the Internet merely twenty. Now that should give all of us pause. I think it's pretty safe to say that, at such speeds, an entity could emerge and captivate the whole planet, connect billions, affect politics, and change the course of history—and yet be gone and fairly forgotten in less than ten years. Sounds crazy? Well, if I had explained what we know of as the Internet today, to you just twenty-five years ago, you'd have probably called me crazy then, too. And similarly, we'd probably call someone crazy tomorrow if they explained something that the Internet will be doing in 2020. The rules have simply changed. "High-speed" represents so much more than a simple designation of service. It means that entities, no matter how grand, arrive and depart at alarming rates. Which begs the question: How can we ultimately have faith in the Internet, other than as a medium for temporary exchange of goods, services, information, and communication? And this might somewhat explain an initial panic over early signs that Facebook isn't going to be around forever, and is in fact just another internet company—here today, gone tomorrow. The problem with this particular virtual entity is that we've placed a lot of faith in it. We've allowed it to become our second life, or in some cases, our first. We've yet to learn our lesson that real life is where it's at—and the Internet should serve a very different purpose. This notion, more than a lot of things, is what worries me most about our young people coming up. They're going to have an increasingly hard time distinguishing between one and the other—with the problem being that they're so invested in the one that isn't real. All the time they invest in the fake one is time not invested in the real one—time with actual people, "present" and committed to the moment—which will certainly hurt their development as productive, worthwhile adults.

Should we make a big deal out of Facebook losing members? Does it represent a much larger shift in our social structure, as a country and inevitably a planet? One thing we forgot to consider was: are the giants of the Internet fail-proof, like the giants of real life supposedly were? We don't have a plan B if we wake up tomorrow and Facebook isn't there anymore. What will we do? Will we tweet? Instant message? Where will we land? Would we have to go back to email—the aging old rust bucket of communication, where answers to questions could take minutes, or even hours, depending on whether someone actually has a life or not? Well, one thing we can be sure of: in time, everything ends—whether the time period consists of millions, thousands, hundreds, or simply tens of years. The fact that this "Age of Access" is making us more lonely, and causing more and more of us to want to unplug, and even seek solace away from the chaos, is not only very telling, but very encouraging. Perhaps we aren't quite as oblivious as it may seem. Perhaps we can delineate between virtual and physical. Perhaps we do know the difference between "poking" someone and actually hugging them, looking into their eyes, being present. But then, perhaps I'm just speaking for everyone over thirty.