A Facebook Christmas Love Story

Walter Kirn in the New York Times Magazine:

ScreenHunter_05 Dec. 20 12.37 In Limbo, where I’ve so often spent the holidays, I sat down last year in front of my computer on the night before the night before Christmas and tried to soothe my balsam-scented loneliness by reaching out to my newfound social network (“social networks” being what we have now in place of “friends and families”). Outside, in the streets of my snowy Montana hometown, noisy drinkers were strolling from bar to bar as I typed out the sad word “Facebook” on my keyboard and scanned my screen for familiar names and pictures. I didn’t find many for the simple reason that I was a novice at silicon socializing, and 90 percent of the people I knew on Facebook were people I didn’t know at all.

More here.