"the use of speech for informal exchange of views or ideas or information etc."
-Princeton
Whenever we post an update on facebook, the event that transpires is not merely the broadcasting of a message in a conversation. It is more like thinking out loud in text, pictures and videos.
The ideas are conveyed in a format that transcends words and tells a lot about your temperament, mood or world view. It is also colored by your personality and attitude.
It is not just a message that you wish to convey, that gets sent, but also how you sent it, when, where and why. It is about your choice of words and your civility or lack off.
More importantly, it is about context. We update our "friends" with what we think are relevant morsels on the things that go on in our lives. Before we press the "Post" button, we think once or twice about what the audience will think. We do this by noting other people's updates. Hence, in a way we are not only conversing, we are not merely thinking out loud - we are thinking out loud in a social sphere in plain view of other beings who are also thinking out loud.
It is in close approximation to what is described as the hive mind. The only differentiating factor is the uniqueness of the hive. In lower mental hives, the participants are drones which convey messages usually in the form of pheromones and chemical signals. Ants and bees are the best examples. They update each other on where food is, or where the enemies are.
In humans it is more complicated. Norms and social parameters govern most members of the hive. Each friend is relegated to a specific category of friends that form its own social cluster.
Embed Facebook?
It is not too far fetched that there will come a time, when organic hybrid electronic devices would be embedded in our brains. This would enable us to communicate in a way that is similar to facebook.
Rather than brining out our mobile devices, we would be boasting about the firmware versions that the embedded microchips in our brains have. Mine is fb v. 2.0. Maybe we would be able to switch from status updates to private messages with two winks of the left eye.
It would be a balance between the hive mind and individual conversation. Speech would become obsolete as we communicate thoughts, pictures, ideas, etc wirelessly.
We could also block out unwanted thoughts from other people.
Lest a stranger bombard us with spam, a virtual handshake is required - where we add each other as friends before anything else.
Revelations
Of course, if you are a Christian, you would say that this might be the proverbial mark of the beast. Time will only tell
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