I disagree with this criticism as it implies that the breakdown of ancient social structures was largely, let alone solely, the unintended (or intended) consequence of liberal social planning. There's plenty of blame to go around.

As surely as civilization killed the campfire tribe, the Industrial Revolution killed the "town square" long before Robert Moses ever did. The halcyon days of Norman Rockwell's happy street of neighbors was simply unable to compete with the cold efficiency of capitalism. By the 1950s, it was dead already, it just didn't know it yet.

Pick your culprit: mass production killing off local stores, industry demanding women in the workforce (and the resulting jobs empowering women to finally achieve independence from men), rising education & incomes enabling geographic mobility (why live on Main Street your entire life when you can move to Madison Avenue?), technology allowing foreign trade and commerce to flourish-- all did as much or more to eliminate the town square as did intentional social planning.

Now, I won't argue that liberal social planning didn't make many of these trends *worse*, but absent theological or secular totalitarianism denying women the opportunity to work, couples the freedom to divorce, children the ability to leave home for college, and businesses the freedom to relocate to lower-cost locales domestic or foreign, so it is impossible to believe that the town square model would ever survive modern capitalism (or the social upheavals of the world wars).

These challenges existed before the Left and the Right crafted solutions to them. That the Left's solutions were so often horribly ignorant of human nature and shortsighted is a justified criticism, but the Left didn't cause these problems, they exacerbated them.

To return to Facebook, I (and many others) argue that at worst, Facebook is a symptom of this cultural shift, not a cause of it. At best, however, Facebook and other social media is an attempt, however crude and novel and imperfect, to establish a new town square model to replace the old model that is gone for good. Human beings still need to connect with each other, tell stories, share jokes, gossip, etc. Thanks to a whole host of reasons, that opportunity to do so in many of our neighborhoods has disappeared, never to return. The question is, what replaces that in the information age? How do we still meet human needs when we can no longer have the old human structures?

Zuckerberg being the POY makes sense to me. Who would have thought that anything could dethrone pornography as king of the internet? Personally, I love Facebook. It's a great tool. It's enabled me to connect and reconnect with people, organizations, ministries and artists that I simply wouldn't have without it. In fact, most of my friends/family that don't use just end up out of the loop- for better or worse.

What is Facebook? Your friends join it, so you create an account. At first it's fun: you get to see witty updates and status and interesting links. Maybe you post a few of your own. But then you realize everybody says mostly the same things - your lefty friends post their lefty links, your righty friends post their righty links, the quiet friends post nothing. Everybody stops reading what everybody else posts, except maybe status updates. So for a while you spend a little time each day trying to think of a witty status update. But that becomes depressing - such a waste of time. So then everybody starts posting quotes. But the quotes just reflect the beliefs they already wore out. And then finally you realize you're just going through the tired motions of a vacuous waste of time, keeping your 'profile' up to date and witty and interesting has become a chore. So you stop updating. But you probably don't delete it, because someone might say something interesting ... eventually.

Facebook works for unconnected single youth, just like every other social medium. And that's about it.

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I agree, for the most part, with the writer of the above op-ed. I think Facebook has been a good tool to have to catch up with friends, make new friends and to stay in touch with family. I do, however, agree with another poster's complaint that eventually postings from some becomes quaint and pedestrian, but that just means some are serially addicted to FB, checking the page everyday. I recently stopped checking everyday and haven't been on for seriously for about a week.

If they were going to go irrelevant and politically correct, I think they should have picked "the bullied gay teen" as POY.

Notice how that "issue" exploded in lamestream media right before the election, and just about disappered afterwards? Classic distraction story. Makes liberals feel good about themselves and their moral superiority, while ignoring uncomfortable realities. Like making an Internet trend the POY instead of anything having to do with domestic or int'l politics.

In short, this is another clear sign that conservatism is ascendent this year!

The MSM wants you to look the other way . . . maybe rent that movie about Facebook (which probably has some commercial tie-in with the publishers of Time) . . .

Hey! AtheistConservative! Get outta my room! It's like you've been looking over my shoulder for the last several months.

This post suggests an almost total ignorance of the way the Facebook actually works. It's another means of communication, pure and simple. If Facebook has done anything to people's face to face interaction, it has increased it by offering people another way to keep in touch with each other. Seriously, these complaints about Facebook are like someone complaining about the invention of the telephone.