Hurrah for friendship. This was one of the messages behind the heart-stopping price of close to 19 billion dollars Facebook offered for WhatsApp, the new instant messaging service.

Is there something to be said for looking at Facebook as one of a long genealogy of modes of reader/viewer identification?

While I am, in theory, a big proponent of the digital humanities, I'm also frequently underwhelmed by projects sold under that label. That's why I was excited recently to find a low-key, creative, straightforward example of how the internet can contribute substantively to humanities scholarship.

So Twitter can hide some tweets, and does, and will continue to do so, now with a toothpick precision to tailor its approach according to the law of the land (or landline) where the 140 character chirp has been posted. And everyone is up in arms and ready to boycott the addictive site for… a day.

What can we learn from eighteen eighteen-year-olds about friendship? Here are some ethnographic notes I made from a freshman seminar I taught this past fall.

Why are we more excited by Facebook than by Google? I thought about this question a couple of weeks ago when the media ran stories about the rivalry between these two corporations.

Question: Where does friendship turn into a thing? Answer: On Facebook. I don’t mean that new digital technologies convert friends into objects. This would be a simplistic reading of social media. I argue, rather, that they transform our human desire for connections into a commercial activity.

In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith has written an interesting review of Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network that doubles as a critique of Facebook.