“I don’t see what the appeal is,” my Vassarite best friend remarked a week ago, shortly after I sent her an instant message rife with exclamation points notifying her that, in the recent flurry of new features and colleges for The Facebook, Vassar had finally been added. For the past eight months I’d been talking to her about The Facebook, updating her on elementary and high school classmates and passing on the latest computer-mediated gossip. But she seemed slightly less than enthralled with the whole thing.

A few hours later, I received an excited message from her saying that she had received a friend request. The next day, she joyfully confided that she had been poked for the first time. By the end of the week, she was hooked. I didn’t even need to say “I told you so.” But I did anyway, because I’m never one to pass up the opportunity to gloat.

I’ve been fascinated by The Facebook ever since its inception, partially due to the ease with which you can find out if someone is single, but mostly due to the anthropological appeal of being able to eavesdrop on and interact with a social community from the comfort of my own desk chair. The Facebook is of particular interest to me because I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with technology, condemning it for fostering impatience and short attention spans while simultaneously becoming ever more reliant on it.

This is the first time most of us have witnessed the transformation of a technological innovation from largely disregarded and brand-new to a part of everyday life. A year ago it didn’t exist; now everyone on campus knows what The Facebook is. As if I needed to provide evidence, I’m currently sitting in Libe Caf� while knocking off this column, and a group of people nearby just spontaneously started talking about their Facebook usage.

The unprecedented and unparalleled speed with which The Facebook has spread through our little community makes it a boon for evaluating the commonly held belief that technology is always improving communication, making it faster and more intimate with every modification. In the beginning this was certainly true; technology bridged the gap between talking face-to-face and communicating over a distance by making the latter more and more like the former. Letters delivered by courier gave way to the much faster telegraph. The telegraph evolved into the telephone, which afforded the nearly instant swapping of voices — it made talking to someone across the country like talking to someone in the other room. The telephone spawned the videophone, which provided both the aural and visual components of a conversation. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the recent creation of certain rubber apparati that one can attach to one’s cell phone and that, when said cell phone is put into a certain mode, can provide a certain tactile quality that one would not otherwise be able to experience so readily.

But once we had the sights and sounds of conversation down pat, something changed. There wasn’t any need for greater intimacy in long-distance communication, nor was there any feasible way to achieve it without the copious use of esters or jolts of electricity strategically applied to the brain. Instead, the focus became making communication more efficient — requiring less investment by the participants. The Internet played a pivotal role in this burgeoning lack of involvement, enabling people to send e-mails to all their friends at once and carry on as many IM conversations as they can fit on their computer screens.

And now, through the miracle of technology, we have The Facebook. You can get to know someone without ever speaking to them, simply by reading their profile. Conversational give-and-take has been replaced by just take. If you’re feeling slightly more interactive, you can send someone a Facebook message — accompanied by the implicit statement: “This message is so unimportant that I don’t care if you only log in and read it a week from now.”

Or, if you’re a particularly social animal, you can send someone a friend request. They’ll be notified of that immediately via e-mail, and with a few simple clicks they can confirm or reject your advances. If they shun your outstretched hand, no big deal; you’ll just pretend you have no idea who they are if you run into them on campus. But if they click the “confirm” button, you’ll know that the two of you share something very special: a desire to have more Facebook friends than everyone else.

There are people I’m “friends” with whom I haven’t spoken to in years. They’re people from my past, vaguely familiar names that I hadn’t thought about until they showed up in my inbox or — guilty as charged — I came across them through a series of connections and decided to send them a friend request on a whim. Their profiles sit like playing cards in my deck of “friends” and we have no intention of ever actually communicating with one another. We maintain our acquaintance through mutual acknowledgment of our lack of desire to reacquaint ourselves.

What happened to long letters handwritten with flourish? What happened to involved lunchtime conversations that stretched into dusk? I have nostalgia for a time in which I never lived, a time when there were three types of people: those you knew, those you didn’t, and those you were sleeping with. Now the waters have been muddied, as friends merge with strangers merge with text on a screen. And, I’ll be damned, I just can’t turn off the computer.