Will me and my piers be writing on eachothers facebook walls at 54 and 78?

I've been wondering since early on the post-Facebook era what will become of the orginal facebook generation (my generation). I mean, will we stay on facebook forever or will we slowly deactivate our facebook accounts like responcible adults around our mid-to-late 30's when we start getting married and/or having kids?

Must would probably say the later but i am very dubious about how easily my piers will be able to give up their facebook profiles just because of something as seemingly arbitrary as age. And the connection between young people and their facebook profiles is generally quite under-estimated. Consider how much time young people spend on facebook not just per-week but per-day. Our facebook profiles our our memberships cards, if you will, our surrogrates, our proxys in a digital commune where we all have become used to interacting on the average Wenseday night at 8 pm. We like writing status and getting instant comments and all the rest. Plus, consider photos on facebook. Now some men but almost all girls have a ton of facebook photos of themselves surrounded by friends. As me and my piers have gotten on in life having all mostly joined facebook (after saying we wouldn't) around Sophomore year of High School girls now have a pretty long history in there facebook photos. They can scroll back and see what they were doing, what color hair they had, how fat or thin they were, who they where hanging out a lot with Freshman year, Sophmore year, Junior year and so fourth and so on. By the time the girls i know are in there late 20's their facebook photo collections will be a priceless part of their collections of stuff (like a scarp-book or a year book X 10). To give up all those photos, would be like burying all those cherished memories of the good ole' days, it would be like erasing their past with the click of a button. Then think of the value added by facebook chat which allows friends from high school dispersed around the nation at colleges, jobs, etc. never be really more than a mouse click away. It wouldn't be to easy to get rid of that kind of conveince, would it? And what would you do instead? Go back to calling friends to ask them "How's Boulder?"? 1. The phone is so much effort 2. it costs money 3. it would be weird to call just to ask "hows boulder?" with some people your friends with but not that close with but wouldn't be weird on facebook. Finally, one of the eternal appeals of staying on facebook, even in a nominile way is that people can contact you that probably wouldn't call you or write you (for whatever reason) the same thing if you didn't have facebook. For instance, with girls i like but aren't close friends with, facebook chat allows for me to talk to them in a non akward way to strike up conversation with them (and possibly kindle something more) by asking them stuff like "Hey, Maddy, i heard you got in a car crash? did you?". And, atleast for me, it would be tough deactivactinng my account because if i did i'm afraid i'd be contsantly be wondering about all the possible out of the blue suprising/at times life changing facebook messages i could have been sent from some girl i like but never thought liked me writing,

"Hey long time, no see. I know we hardly talked at ETHS but I always thought you where really intresting and funny and cool and I always wanted to chill with you. Anyway, i heard your in town right now and i just moved back home too and I was wondering what your up to. I hope you don't think this is weird of me. If you want to ever hang out my numbers 1-847-477-2389. bye Daniel."

I've actually gotten a few of those in the past. There the kind of things you read that make you feel like a million bucks and give a rush of adrelaine and excitement and ancipation, ya' know? Well, for some reason, I haven't checked my facebook messages in 3-4 months (i now have 291 messages to read) and I'm hoping to find some messages like the one above the day i devote to opening all those letters/messages. My fear is that they'll all be facebook-group or event mass messages like

"SUMMERCAMP 2010, line up announced today! merchandice available too!"

p.s.

A FINAL THOUGHT:

Like i said by the time my generation is 30 or 40 years old our facebook accounts will be so valuable to us with all those photos, that huge archive of old status' and wall posts and videos and messages, etc. that we can look to look back on our lives. This raises to unappealing possibilities:

1. That facebook will start to charge people who have had facebook accounts for over 10 or 15 years knowing that we will pay to keep our 83,000 photos and wall posts &

2. That all this constantly looking back at facebook photos of us at 18 and 24 when where 37 or 40 will make us the most depressed and nostlagic generation ever.