Social Entropy: The Eventual Heat Death of My Ability to Talk To People

God, that's a long-ass title.

There are many things I don't fully understand. Among them lies a good ninety percent of physics, and firmly nestled within that region lies entropy, and the related supposition the heat death of the universe. Without asking anyone to read those (lord knows I can't stomach anything that dense), the long and short of it is that some very smart people have taken the property of heat distributing evenly within a system and taken it to the mind-blowing, horrifying extreme, that is, they've decided it means we're all going to die and the universe will become a very static, very cold place.

Now, I've never given two shits about any apocalypse theory, mostly because the scientists keep slapping calmingly large numbers on them, and I can't be bothered to worry about the fate of my great-great-great-great-hyperion-super-grandchildren (and the rapture and all those like it make me laugh). The point of that whole entropy bit then, in addition to providing me with what I believe is the longest title to date, is to note that systems have a tendency to reach equilibrium, in which everything has already been distributed and there's no more reactions to go bang! and make a bunch of high schoolers care about science for however short a time period.

I was thinking about this, and Facebook. And therein lies the connection. Facebook is the cancer that is killing my ability to hold conversations.

Think about it. A conversation can, if you're of a pocket-protector-wearing sort of mentality, be related to entropy. One person has information that the other lacks (unbalanced system). The information is shared (reaction, the spreading of heat, entropy), and the people are, with regards to that information, equal (balanced system). So to put it in less dense terms, conversations are fueled by an unequal spread of information, and the conversations themselves are the rectification of that.

Now, look at Facebook. With a few clicks, you can bring yourself up to date on the approximated life of (in my case) /hundreds/ of people, at least some of whom you interact with regularly. Suddenly, they don't need to tell you anything. They're removed from the equation. They have nothing to say to you, because any news they may have had is old news by the time they're talking to you.

So while before, you could greet a person and swap stories of all the chicks you heard Anthony was banging, now it's redundant, as you both read Anthony's hilarious statuses about his furious intercourse (because it's a great word, that's why) with not only your mother, but your sister as well. Sure, there are other conversational options, but it's hard to keep an exchange solely abstract. The human experience relies pretty heavily on (shocker) experiences, and anything that takes away from the proper enjoyment of them (read: gloating after the fact) is something that we ought to tread carefully with, to say the least. Because if the men in lab coats are to be believed, if we don't, we'll eventually stop talking forever and freeze to death.

Or something. (What was that about arguments from analogy being inherently flawed?)

Of course, I might as well title this post a lesson in hypocrisy and self-contradiction, because I'll acknowledge here that a) I still use Facebook in spite of this and b) there are other things to discuss (though like I said, they're not a full replacement).

So what say you, readers? Am I blowing this out of proportion? Should we kill Mark Zuckerberg? Will anyone even fucking read this?

Answer at least some of those, with any luck, in the comments.

P.S. Still totally on hiatus, this just felt like it needed to be said.