I just don’t get it. It’s not like I don’t get the Internet or social networking. After all, I am blogging. But Facebook is more than just a social networking tool in Toronto. It has become a city-wide obsession. Toronto now has the dubious honour of becoming the first city in North America to break the 1,000,000 user mark. Is this something that we should be proud of?

Here are some facts about the Facebook phenomena:
•    There are currently 59,000,000 active users, second only to MySpace with 100,000,000 users
•    Since January 2007 there are approximately 250,000 new registrations per day
•    Facebook is growing at a rate of 3% per week
•    Facebook is the number 1 photo sharing application on the Internet
•    There are now over 7,000,000 subscribers in Canada
•    Approximately ½ of all Canadians who have Internet access are on Facebook
•    Canada has the most Facebook users outside of the USA
•    Canadian Facebook members are predominantly females between the ages of 18 to 34
•    Canadians spend an average of 5.7 hours on the site
•    The Province of Ontario has blocked the site for government employees during work hours

Facebook has become the social networking darling, especially in Toronto. People are connecting and reconnecting with friends and family across the street and across the globe. The thing that worries me about all of this social networking is that I believe that we are becoming anti-social as a result. We no longer have to get out and engage face-to-face. Instead we engage online avatar-to-avatar. We don’t talk. We e-mail and text message each other instead. As a result of all of this social networking, are we losing our ability to connect and communicate on a human level?