Marking Facebook's Face

Websites reflect the values that inform them. “Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder,” Zadie Smith wrote of Facebook. “Poking, because that's what shy boys do to girls they're scare to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what friendship is.” Adrien Chen brings us up to date. Everything wrong Facebook, from its cavalier treatment of privacy to its narrow view of Facebook friendship stems from the fact that it models human relations on Zuckerberg's “social graph,” a model of human relationships based on computer logic, he writes. Deo gratias, we aren't mere machines.  

Of Friends

"The mind's impromptu likes or dislikes, its ecentric detours, are the quirks that cement friendship," contributing editor Edward Hoagland opens his essay "On Friendship" in the latest American Scholar. Love for parents, spouse, children seems "as natural as leaves sprouting," he affirms. Yet, the luxuriance of love continues  where no self-replication is involved, no guardianship of clan, and "survival defers to whimsey, grace, and elan, where civilization takes hold." Deo gratias, for even if friendship were unnecesary, like philosophy and art, as C.S. Lewis posits, "it is one of those things that gives value to survival." On Friendship