Vedant Misra



Next they'll say all we talk about is debauchery!

I just noticed something interesting in the URLs for wall-to-wall post listings on Facebook -- they take the form:

"http://www.facebook.com/wall.php?id=######&banter;_id=######&ref;=nf"

"banter"? "banter"?! It's nice to know that Zuckerberg and all of the other egotistical fat cats (read: "innovative businesspeople of whom I am insanely jealous") in Palo Alto think of our wall posts as meaningless repartee. I certainly wouldn't use that word to describe the kind of conversations I've come across on Facebook; take this one as an example:

Person A: yoooo wut up? last nite i was just hangin around listneing to some music and i think i found this huge contradiction in hume's objection to the ontological argument
Person B: heyy man its been too long! yo stop wasting your time with hume man - his axioms themselves are flawed. if you want a good reason to lose faith in the ontological argument go look up gaunilo's island. i found this awesome paper on jstor by mann (1976) that you might want to check out
Person A: yo id never even heard of gaunilo before you mentioned him. this guy totally tears anselm apart. but its lame tho cause he never got to read meditations so well never kno what hed say to descartes.yo wanna get wasted tonight?
Person B: yea ok call me

Banter? Hardly.