Does the Social Network Come With a Social Contract?

A Facebook acquaintance I am quite fond of posted as her status update recently:

"I am currently having a professional e-mail conversation with a fully grown man to conduct business. And yet, he is writing to me in text speak. He is not on his phone (that shouldn't matter anyway), and is full out dropping "u", "r" and "k tnks" left and right. What do I do? Answer in paragraphs. Long, drawn out paragraphs. I may break out Ye Olde English soon."

I literally "laughed out loud" seeing one of her friend's quick retort: "I h8 txt spk."

Web 7.0 is here and thank God (so far), I'm part of it. The reason that appreciation of the form strikes such a different note than my young colleague Helena Andrews' owly observation about the difficulties of buzz maintenance on gchat and Twitter, or my colleague Sarah Wildman's wry remarks on her 30-something generation's struggles to remain unfriends with old boyfriends (be glad the persistent contacts don't extend to their mothers . . . ) is that I am looking at the social phenomenon from the post-60 side of the spectrum.

Facebook, the reigning Goliath of the cyber networking species, announced last week that in exactly one year, the social network has doubled its customer base from 250 million to 500 million global users. I only know about singularity from what I read in Wired, but Facebook's acceleration is still gaining momentum (and China has not even yet opened its arms to the possibilities of spying on so many of citizens through one voluntary sign-up sheet) and, in my lifetime, I'm sure will impact a marriage of molecules and machines.

My friend Leora, a reluctant 50-something subscriber who only signed up at the possibility of remotely monitoring her teenage children (see: helicopter) complained that she is at war with Facebook. The e-mail notification feature sets off her Blackberry every time someone in her network hiccups, her son refuses to friend her, and her daughter adjusted her privacy settings so narrowly all Leora can see is that the young woman attends Sarah Lawrence (a fact her parents already had much financial documentation to support).

Personally, I am proud to have been among the boomer pioneers of the 6-year-old cyber party line. In 2006 I took some pains to acquire an .edu e-mail suffix so I'd qualify for enrollment loosely restricted to students at the time. (The only people I knew to "poke" were my children's friends and Howie Kurtz.)

There's no doubt in my mind that despite the tedious design changes every few Web cycles, virus-highjacked wall postings, Farmville + Mafia applications, and the eventual commodification of every random thought we dare to share, social media will be as important to my generation's future communication as the telephone was to our past.

I used to be an early adopter to social media but, to be honest, I am already losing my grip on what's next in connectivity and am doomed to fall exponentially behind the zeitgeist. I have a cognitive inability to compose 140-character wisdoms in bulk and also possess a congenital emotional reluctance to upgrade my electronics – (a recent cell phone emergency replacement/upgrade to a Droid was agonizingly painful.)

At this moment in history however, I am ideally equipoised. I love seeing pictures of new babies and old class gatherings but, fortunately, with my low tech quotient I can inflict very little harm to my own reputation through ill-considered tagging. Right now, and hopefully again at some future moment, Facebook and I are in perfect sync.

The same may not be said for creator and former Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, whose avatar, played by actor Jesse Eisenberg in the movie "The Social Network" (based on an unauthorized biography and rich litigation archives), will soon appear as a third-party application from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's rich imagination (tag line: "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies").

As Zuckerberg watchers know, the site CEO can be brash and impetuous and has been accused of stealing the idea for "The Face Book" from a pair of twin upperclassmen in 2004. The following fall he left Cambridge for Palo Alto to see where the allegedly purloined vision would take him. Hollywood's interpretation of those events opens in October. Zuckerberg told ABC's Diane Sawyer the film is "fiction" and he has no plans to view the Sony release.

The other 500 million of us, however, plan to buy tickets.