From Community to Facebook 843The trend toward increased privacy could be seen
even within the home. Young Boomers generally ate
dinner in a family dining room and played cards and
board games afterwards in the living room. By the
mid 1950s, television-watching had become a family
affair, and a child’s dreaded punishment was to be
sent to his or her room after dinner. During the
1980s and 1990s, however, homes became larger
and families smaller. Most Millennials had their own
bedrooms. By 1975 fewer than half of Americans
ate dinner with their whole family; and by 2000,
that number was fewer than one-third. Family
members instead retreated to their own rooms to
watch their own television shows or log onto the
Internet. (In 2010 the average number of TV sets
per household—2.93—exceeded the number of people
per household—2.88.) For Millennials, the worst
punishment was to be deprived of the Internet or
theirBlackberries.
Millennials withdrew to the privacy of their
rooms in order to socialize. David Greenfield of the
Center for Internet Studies explained that the
Internet was “a socially connecting device that’s
socially isolating at the same time.” For their part,
most Millennials thought the Internet improved
social relations. “I’ve outsourced my social life exclu-
sively to Facebook,” one Millennial explained in- “My time on Facebook substitutes for face
time and has made my life more organized and effi-
cient.” In 2010 Facebook reported that the average
college student had over 400 Facebook friends.
Plenty of users greatly exceeded this average, prompt-
ing Facebook in 2008 to rule that friendship rosters
would be capped at 5,000. Social connections in
excess of 5,000, Facebook officials reasoned, were
probably not “actual friends.” While bemoaning the
cutoff, Jeffrey Wolfe, a real estate broker in San
Francisco with 4,447 friends, conceded that keeping
up with them could be demanding: “Normally I start
hitting it about 10 o’clock at night, and if I do it
right, I can be done by 1 a.m.”
Some worried that Millennials spent so much
time attending to their own circle of Facebook
friends (however great in circumference) or logging
onto sites dedicated to Lady Gaga, labrador retriev-
ers, or Legos, that they often failed to encounter
InSecond Life, multi-player online game, these two avatars engage in virtual courtship.