I shall call it Spiffy!

A few months ago, I shocked my friends Tina & K with the revelation that I was still using a computer K had put together for me before they were parents. And married. And homeowners. They broke it to me--oh, so gently--that I really needed to look into a new computer, because I was playing Solitaire on borrowed time. All hard drives go to heaven eventually.

But I am a creature of habit. My computer is a comfortable electronic burrow, and I know and love all its nooks and crannies. Sure, it could run a little faster, or quieter, but I could start up the programs I needed with the monitor off. A new computer would mean a new operating system to figure out, a whole new mokie-cave to customize and become accustomed to.

And what's wrong with Windows 2000 anyway? Besides that nobody supports it anymore. Or uses it. What? Yes, Windows 2000. Don't look at me like that.

So I've done it: after a really good month that left me with a little extra money, I admitted defeat and bought a new computer.

It's sleek. It's shiny. It's silent. It's adorable--so tiny it could fit inside my old tower. Hell, it's smaller than my old monitor. It's almost painfully speedy.

Not so speedy, though, is me trying to get used to Windows 7. It looks and feels as if everything is bubble-wrapped; there are lots of nifty helpful hints and nudges to do things that I'm not interested in at all ("Want to watch videos on Hulu?" No.), and the simple things (so I need to access this flash drive, and reorganize the start menu...) are tucked away out of sight.

I can see why they used a 5-year-old to show how easy it is, but I need the grown-up's guide to it.

The problem with Windows 7

Windows 7 is the OS equivalent of a fancy dress party where lines of waiters offer you trays of silver laden with caviar, escargot, gold-flecked chocolates, and more, as you cross your legs and ask, over and over, "No, thank you, where's the restroom?"

Why Facebook doesn't matter.

The media likes to claim that the Internet has the attention span of a toddler.

Remember this. I'll come back to it.

Ezra Klein offers an explanation of why Facebook matters, which is really more a comment on a quote from a GQ article, Viral me:

"The big change, the big shift in the Internet that's happened in the past three or four years, is the shift towards social being the most important thing," Angus says. "So now increasingly you discover content or care about content in the context of your friends. Up until now, Google's PageRank has been the dominant way that content gets sorted, ordered, and found on the Internet. And the threat from Facebook is to say, 'wait, we're going to reorder the whole Internet, all the content out there. And instead of it being based around some algorithm that a search engine says is important, we're going to base it around who you are, who your friends are, and what those people are interested in."

Why has this shift happened in the past three or four years?

It hasn't.

When the media talked about the Internet a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, what was the context? Blogs. Memes. Viral advertising. Musicians who got their start on Youtube or MySpace, nerd bloggers who become minor stars in their own right. The power of 'word of mouth', and the Internet as the new grassroots.

When the media talked about the Internet ten or even fifteen years ago, what was the context? Forums. Chat rooms, and what your kids might be up to in them. How a cheap indie horror flick became a blockbuster international hit through 'Internet buzz'. People talking to each other over computers instead of the telephone!

The media likes to claim that the Internet has the attention span of a toddler, but it's the media and its less-than-nerdy target audience that are guilty of not paying attention. A few large social hubs burst onto the scene in the past couple of years, and where most other social hubs focused on users finding other users with similar interests, these hubs encouraged users to recruit their family, offline friends and acquaintances. Yes, thanks to this shift, the uncle who joked that the only reason you could have to own a computer is to look up porn is now asking to be your friend on Facebook.

The shift isn't social. The shift is personal.

It isn't simply that a lot of people who thought that Google was the Internet (and who, ten years earlier, would have thought that AOL was the Internet) are panicking because they can't find Facebook. It's that, oh my God, comment #6 is my mother!*

It isn't that your kid sister is now talking to people over the computer, and NBC wants you to make sure she does so safely! It's that your kid sister is talking to you over the computer, and your mother wants to know what she's saying on her Wall because sis defriended her after their latest spat.

It isn't about discovering or caring about content in the context of your friends. It's about discovering content posted by friends you made in high school, and by people you know by their real names, people who don't even know what an Internet handle is, much less what yours is--and that's the way you want to keep it.

God help the relative who finds my Twitter account.

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* Rhetorical device. My mother did not comment to that article. I hope.