It's odd to see things like Facebook framed as necessary and vital to our social/cultural wellbeing when we've only lived under their influence for a handful of years. Authors do a great job outlining how difficult it is to effectively "quit" Facebook, but don't make half as compelling an argument about why we need Facebook. Indeed, at a certain point, the authors create sort of a false equivalency between things like Facebook and other privacy-threatening amenities such as credit cards or bank accounts. But the stark fact is, we voluntarily give up some right to privacy when we apply for credit or open a bank account because we actually need those things. We don't need Facebook in the strictest sense, and therefore can afford to pass it up in favor of other social outlets current and future. This article, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption that we somehow can't afford to live without Facebook. Which is kind of absurd, considering how long we lived without Facebook before we lived with Facebook. It's also odd that they criticize the "love it or leave it" strategy as "behavior that justifies a never-ending strategy of abandoning every social technology that threatens privacy -- a can being kicked down the road in perpetuity without us resolving the hard question of whether a satisfying balance between protection and publicity can be found online." Isn't abandoning a product due to privacy concerns the free market capitalist solution in and of itself? Isn't this what our economy is predicated upon- the idea that if you don't like a product, you can choose to abandon it until it's been improved, and that enough pressure by way of lost revenue will force improvement? Why, then, should we stick with a product we hate? Because we need it? But we don't.
You're quite right - Facebook is hardly vital, and hasn't been around that long. But its ubiquity, instantaneousness and the fact that it is free - as well as the fact that people seem much more open to accepting a friend invite on Facebook than to give their phone number - have made it one of the media of choice for communicating with people. You want to organise football on Friday and don't want to text people, since that'll cost credit? Facebook away! (Actually, it's kind of funny that Facebook 'friendship' is much less personal than a phone number or email address. I have the email address of very few of my friends.)
I'm not sure whether it says something of my generational standpoint or my lack of a social life that I use Facebook for little other than seeing what my high school/college friends look like these days. Little of column A, little of column B most likely. It's funny, Facebook came to fruition when I was right in the middle of college, so you'd think I'd be in the sweet spot in terms of target audience. But out of the categories of people I see actively using Facebook- people a generation older than me who use it to post pictures of their kids/talk about their kids (keep in mind, I have a kid, I just don't really think to use Facebook this way), people a generation below me who use it to post pictures of themselves in fun situations, and people in any generation seeking to promote their enterprise/live show/new book etc.- neither I nor my friends fall into any of them. So I encounter this situation where, out of all the activity I see on Facebook, almost none of it is generated by my close friends, who all at this point live across the country from me and all keep up via the more "traditional" methods- e-mail and phone. I'd worry that the implications point to me being a total social cockroach if I hadn't heard the same exact thing from a good portion of my cohorts. Either way though, I guess what I should pull from this is that although I don't personally pull anything of immediate value from the Facebook experience, maybe other people in other situations pull quite a lot from it, so who am I to criticize too vocally. To my original point, though- whether you think Facebook is great or Facebook is the devil, it's still weird to argue that it's totally necessary, as the Atlantic authors seem to be arguing. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, you'd probably go back to organizing a quick football game via group e-mail, my landlord would go back to sharing pictures of her kids via Picasa or her wallet (totally fine, they're cute kids), and I'd go back to waiting until awkward class reunions to find out how much more successful my former classmates are than I am (a lot, generally speaking). Can you imagine a world without banks? Not quite the same thing.
But yes, Facebook is not necessary to social life in the way implied in the article.If Facebook disappeared tomorrow
Ah, but that's a different argument - that's about the entire institution disappearing, not just you disappearing from the institution. If Facebook disappeared, we'd organise football via e-mail, maybe, but if you leave Facebook - and no-one else does - then you might get left out.