A Fox or Two

Judging by some qualities, such as nationality, Facebook expands the diversity of our acquaintances. But it is, at its base, a tool for social autonomy. It enables easy association with those to whom we incline while not compelling friendships with those whom we find more difficult, such as the elderly. We are likelier to talk to the elderly when confined by physical spaces — at a café, in a church, on the street — and the more that our lives are digitally mediated, the more those physical contacts vanish.  

Facebook appears to have been modeled on C. S. Lewis’s Hell. It is the acme of modernized society, allowing us unrestrained control over our relationships — we literally choose the face that others see, and can start or end a friendship by tapping a finger. These friendships never become inconvenient, because no obligation can impose itself through the digital medium. 

The irony of Facebook, and of modernity’s expansion of social autonomy generally, is that total, unlimited cosmopolitanism in the end produces more parochialism, homogenization, and even chauvinism than geographical confinement does: I can now commune with people all over the world of all nationalities and tongues and races who are just like me.