Facebook as a Threat to Storytelling

Here’s a good question: what if the discomfort expressed, on different fronts and with rationales, by the Malcolm Gladwells and Bill Kellers and the Zadie Smiths and whoever else hates the Face-Twitters now, was mostly just a love of (or addiction to?) narrative? Facebook stories don’t really have any endings, and neither do they always have multiple conflicting sources (not like the newspapers have much of that either anyway). “At the end of every magazine article, before the “■,” is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There’s the kiss, the kicker, the snappy comeback, the defused bomb. The Epiphanator transmits them all. It promises that things are orderly. It insists that life makes sense, that there is an underlying logic.” Newspapers, magazines and procedurals are the last forms hanging on to tidy endings. The rest of us are just, like, living here.