The story of Facebook begins in February of 2004, when the social rubric of everyday life was altered with the launch of what was then known as “thefacebook.com” at Harvard University, a site programmed by Zuckerberg, just 19 years old at the time. Within its first month, more than half of Harvard was registered to use it, and by December of 2005, the site had 5.5 million student users, who posted their most intimate personal details – everything from their favorite songs to who they were dating and more – for any and all to view. As it spread beyond schools to the rest of the world, Facebook emerged as the globe’s digital public commons – a massive, radiating mesh of connections and relationships representing the social interactions of more than 500 million users (if Facebook were a country, it would now be more than 1.5 times

as populous as the United States, and would be the third largest country in the world.) In just six years, Facebook became a cultural force unto itself – a new mechanism for making friends in an increasingly isolated world and a heavy influence on a generation that has overturned old definitions of privacy. Facebook has helped to forge a brave new world of online lives in which everybody knows everyone else’s business, in which people construct their identities for public consumption, and in which many use Facebook as an archive for the entire breadth of their existence. Like other major technological revolutions before it, Facebook has already been both celebrated and excoriated for its impact – the full consequences of which even the savviest social analysts can’t quantify so early in the game.