Yahoo! and Facebook.com are not yet friends; you might say that Mark Zuckerberg's friendship comes at too high a price. His recent rejection of Yahoo!'s billion-dollar offer is only the latest installment of Facebook hype. Other questions gripping the nation: will Facebook fade like Friendster? Does it enable predators? Has it cheapened social interaction into quick volleys that barely qualify as coherent thoughts, let alone as ingredients of intimacy?

Aren't these slight sentences proof of our modern orgy of thoughtless self-disclosure?

We can't tell and yet, somehow, we carry on. At 9:04pm, Facebook notifies me that my friend D. has added Hot Chip to the "favorite music" section of her profile. I haven't thought about D. all day, but now I do. Maybe she heard Hot Chip for the first time and decided the world must know. Maybe something triggered a memory of Hot Chip. Maybe she meant to type something else entirely, but was mentally waylaid by a snack-food craving. Such are my idle thoughts in the months following the launch of Facebook's "mini-feed" feature, which collates all profile updates from all "friends" into a minute-by-minute ticker of photos uploaded, bands discovered, books read, events attended, quotations digested, and life lived. An example (for those still strangers to Facebook):

D. added "revolution" to her Interests.

I. is no longer single.

P. is sleeping.

Members may customize or disable the mini-feed, but I admit it's my favorite aspect of the site. Pure curiosity is one factor; friend O. just added "Phantom of the Opera" to her list of favorite movies, and I will ask her why tomorrow. But even more than the statements of taste, I enjoy the Facebook "status update," a simple announcement of one's present condition, current activity, or timeless essence:

S. is hungry and wearing funny clothes.

"Moments of being," Virginia Woolf might have called them (they consist of at most 160 characters, spaces included), and I read them religiously. Yet if you are a non-Facebookie, MySpacer, or LiveJournalist, you may be skeptical already. Status updates do seem like the ultimate waste of keystrokes—the nadir of information overload. The nuggets are barely informative, much less narrative or argumentative. Aren't these slight sentences proof of our modern orgy of thoughtless self-disclosure?

I grant that some updates are not exactly electrifying. Most seem disposable, haphazard, meant to be forgotten. But their point is not to be memorable. Their point is to create a tiny mystery. They remind me of the deep compactions and omissions often found in poetic language, meaning much while saying little, creating a niche for the reader to fill with imagination and empathy. When I imagine the 15-20 seconds it takes to conceive and write an update, I imagine a Facebooker making the conscious (and unconscious) judgments necessary to art at any level: selecting a feeling or idea to express, selecting which words to include (and by extension, to exclude), which questions to answer and which to leave hanging. What moved K. to quote Blonde Redhead's mournful "Falling Man" with no comment? What has brought on A.'s recklessness? As for L. and the penguins, call it nonsense, but why that nonsense in particular?

The sheer volume of Net interaction brings backlash from those who believe all information shared in writing must be well planned, well-polished, publication-worthy. The joys of live socializing—the sarcasm, allusions, vaguenesses, tangents, invented words, insinuations, impersonations, and other filler—may seem like a waste of time when shared over the Web. Yes, these status updates are little turns in the spotlight, each update representing a moment's re-invention and re-incarnation. I seek attention when I announce that I am "in love with Leonardo DiCaprio all over again" (translation: I saw and enjoyed the new Scorsese movie), I am "conducting the Rite of Spring, the best half-hour of music ever written" (no one can compete with Stravinsky), I am "wearing an overcoat and scarf around the house" (coldness is only one reason). But it is no more sinister than my announcing these facts to friends in person, as part of everyday banter.

Facebook and other youthful outlets are often called "fads," and implicit in that word is the assumption that experience makes no imprint—that the "fad-followers" shuffle through life essentially memoryless, with no capacity for comparing or contrasting past and future. Is this a solely generational criticism, the fickle youth expressing themselves via "status updates" versus the mature, consistent adults with their essays and articles and treatises? Are these two modes of expression incompatible? Already I know that the generation raised on the Internet is developing a fundamentally new, playful, exploratory attitude toward Internet text, and maybe even toward words themselves. I believe they are more likely to use the Internet as a sketchpad, a slate for constant revision and reconceptualization, rather than a place where thoughts are set down imperiously and importantly as if in stone. I see us transforming the Net into a medium more closely mirroring the strengths and flaws of live interaction: a medium where the smallest thought is not just trivia, but evidence of minds beating, absorbing, digesting, changing, and acknowledging this change.

When I first signed up on Facebook, I did so as a snob, determined to present nothing less than the most erudite, thoughtful, word-perfected version of myself. But over the weeks and months, the print paradigm I had brought with me—that of the static essay or article slaved over for hours, days, weeks—came to terms with instant obsolescence, the new convention of constant update and retort. Some might call this the disaster of the Internet, but I see it as a lesson that what I have to say is less precious, less indispensable, and less important than I think it is. It's a good lesson.

Janani Sreenivasan is an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Image credit: "New Facebook" by Flickr user rcrowley