I surrender. Now stop sending me emails.

Great Bird of the Galaxy, forgive me.

It was just a matter of time, of course. My willpower is far from legendary or anything, and I knew that I was going to "cave", as Cortney so eloquently puts it, sometime or another--I fully intended to, since once I'm done high school I'd like to preserve my connections with my friends through whatever means available. And, as much as I hate to admit it, social networking sites help.

So I joined Facebook.

That's right. I'm tired of those snarky little "I've added you as a friend on Facebook..." emails finding their way into my inbox, begging me to get an account. -_- Fine. I surrender. Now stop sending me emails. (I have a feeling I'm going to continue getting them anyway, since that's the nature of the beast).

However, an interestingly paranoid Orwellian thought occurred to me. As our technology increases, the government institutes increasingly complex methods of keeping track of us. The day is not far off when some sort of "national ID" system will be implemented. We already have several numbers associated with us--driver's licence, SIN, health card, etc. Naturally people start to get paranoid about the government having access to all our private information.

Yet most people have no problem giving out their private information to sites like Facebook. So this begs the question: what if a site, like Facebook, isn't actually run by a private corporation? What if it's a front for the government, a way of clandestinely gathering people's private information? Someone in the government will eventually wake up and do this, if it isn't already being done. It's a great method of data-mining your citizens without their knowledge. After all, who are you going to trust? Facebook, or the government?

Facebook, obviously, because their lovely little "JOIN OUR SITE" emails means they care. So much. :angel: And they don't charge you taxes, which I suppose contributes.

Note this well: I surrendered to Facebook. But I will never, ever join MySpace so long as there is a speck of breath left in this body. As far as I'm concerned, MySpace is still a scourge, a blight on the Internet, and its time will come. Until then, I'm just going to continue ignoring it and block all those idiots who try to hotlink my smilies.