I logged on to Facebook just now and the first post on my news feed was a picture of a dead guy with his brains blown out. Now I have the image of this guy’s inner mind ejected over the concrete with his body plastered in blood haunting my being. There are some things you can never erase from your memory and forever see on the insides of your eyelids, and this is one of them.

So it got me thinking about Facebook and what it is really all about…I mean besides selling all your personal information to the government, keeping copies of your pictures for their giant Facebook photo book that is shared with a series of questionable characters, and a covert target marketing campaign that infiltrates your soul every time you log on. Yes we use it to connect to other people, brag about our accomplishments, boast our intelligence by quoting people more intelligent than us, pretend you remembered someone’s birthday, and sometimes over-share our feelings about a break up… but there is something more to Facebook. Something as addictive as it is sinister, as profound as it is superficial.

Because Facebook began as an exclusive network for ivy league students it has miraculously been able to maintain its cache even though everyone and their mother is on it. Literally… your mom is probably pressing “like” on a picture of a kitten about to fall into a toilet right now. Because of its origins, it is probable that Facebook will only gain cultural relevance in the years to come. It has managed to avoid the traps other social networking sights failed to protect themselves from of becoming cheesy, and has such a stronghold on the market that no one can really compete. Who wants to have to check another platform when you already have Facebook?

But the question is where is Facebook going to take us, or where are we going to take it? Although I was not quite ready to be exposed to a gruesome murder when I was actually looking to see if any one posted a video with some child singing a Lady Gaga song, it made me think of how potent and valuable this tool could really be. There is vast potential for organization on our part, like a nation wide ban of a certain company, a collective push to elect an honorable politician, or we could just continue posting status updates of what we ate that day.

“Oooo I got one Mom! Write… “sitting on the counter munching on bread…”