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Facebook commodifies weak social ties.

"Hi, you're in my biology lab. What are you doing Friday?"

College does one of those interesting things that only modern institutions do. It brings together a great number of men and women in their prime. Walking the halls and grounds of a university in between classes is a cavalcade of beauty and opportunity. One can suspect that each face has a future, a potential financial success.

Before was the city, a convergence point of people from far and wide. It was a measure of the degraded institutions of family and community that would have placed strictures on intimate contact.

"Hi, you work at the Triangle Shirt Factory. Are you going to the dance Friday?"

Then came modern travel: the steamboat and the steam engine became a recursive social algorithm for those weak social ties.

"Hi, I saw you on the westbound 4:19. Seeing anyone?"

Something intoxicating occurs when I go to a hotel. There among the halls I sense an opportunity to meet and have completely meaningless encounters with others. The freedom from significance is all that I seek. And removed from the strictures of social ties I can be a nobody, a perfect nobody.

Freed from my social body I shed the social anxieties and pathologies of self, which they have created and which become the behavioral automata that I self-medicate in order to mitigate.

Facebook is merely a communication appliance that extends this weak tie. I use something as simple as Google to seek out the names of those missed opportunities. It's a wishing well for the information age. Carving one's name on a tree along an oft-traversed path is the graffiti of one's discontent.