"The concept of social networks is not new, because even back in
the bad old ASCII days we had Usenet, Fidonet, Bulletin Board
Services, MUDs, chatrooms, and so on. It was wonderful-- for twenty
bucks a month to get online I could talk to people all over the
planet. Facebook, MySpace, and so on are the natural evolutions of
those early text-based social networks. Now they're all glitzy,
script-and graphics-heavy, full of annoying ads and spam, and new
generations of users who faint at the sight of a command prompt.
But this new generation are remarkably bold at sharing intimate
personal details and humiliations in detail and in color. It's like
those garrulous strangers who pester people at bus stops with gory
details of their sex and medical histories discovered it was much
more efficient to spread vast doses of TMI online."
