To keep in touch with friends all over the world! Not really. It’s true I have friends in the sense of “I want to know what you’re doing in your life but you’re far away”, but also a yearly email would do, with much less effort.

So, the answer is: because everyone had it, invited me, told me how many laughs they were having with that latest funny picture of whoever and so on. As usual, I gave up in a period in which I was bored and looked for something culturally cheap to do, and now I spend some minutes everyday watching that funny picture which actually isn’t very funny, damn.

Anyway, this wasn’t what I wanted to say. Actually there is an interesting feature of Facebook I found. In my real life, usually I meet friends—of the type described before—in some highly specific situation (read as: university, school, sport…). This usually means that you know only some aspects of their personality, related to the situation. Instead, on Facebook, you have to cohabit with the all-around person and you can discover something that can change the way you think at that person. Just some examples: join a pro-Gelmini [¹] group, or join another one against gay marriage just the day after the Pope considered licit to torture and murder them.

This almost never happened to me: in my mind virtual people with avatars or nicknames were almost considered distinct from the real ones, but Facebook contacts are the real people. Is this a win for Facebook or just something I’m noticing alone?