Facebook and Moving Back

As I mentioned in a prior post, Facebook has become a tremendous community for middle-class Jamaicans *and Trinidadians), and one of the things I have noticed is that that there is a very steep age-curve.

In other words, younger members are using it heavily, and have hundreds of friends who are already registered and listed in their list of friends. For each year that a user ages, however, the smaller the number of friends that have listed.

What does this say about the future, given the addictive nature of the programme?

The fact is, Facebook makes it effortlessly easy to do things that used to take a lot of time and effort. Giving friends a short update? Finding out who they know? Putting a name to a face? Sharing recent news about oneself? Meeting people who are friends of friends? Facebook makes all of this quite easy, and it is way less intrusive than email, less time-consuming than meeting them in person, and less costly than trying to attend every party possible.

It simply is the best networking tool that I have found, and its power can only increase as more users join.

For those that are too busy to use it, prepare to be increasingly left out of the loop.

For someone who has moved back to Jamaica, it is a critical connector with friends and family across the globe. In other parts of this blog I have talked about the need to be two-headed upon returning -- connected both here in Jamaica, and in the country that one left. This tool makes it so much easier to be connected.

Unfortunately, to disregard Facebook out of hand, is to disregard people -- much in the same way that some chose not to bother with the breakthrough inventions of postal systems, telephones and email. The result was the same in each case -- non-participation in the lives of others, and being increasingly left out of social circles.