These early reports touch upon the effect that would always represent Facebook's apologia pro vita sua: it was bringing people together. In truth, however, what Facebook was offering users was not a fuller and more ordered "social" life but something even more alluring: an augmented representation of themselves. Not as they were, exactly, but at their contrived best, with hundreds of friends (before success became equated with thousands) and others still in queue awaiting "approval." It is useful to recall what limited functionality the site had when it started tempting thousands of students to spend hours playing with it. There were no messages, no pokes—no forms of social interaction but the invitation to be friends. Apart from stalking others on the network, there was nothing to do there except refine one's own profile, reconsider one's photograph, and marvel at one's own numerically and geographically determined social cachet. The profile was really the attentional bait, the pool into which untold undergraduate Narcissi were staring while they ditched class.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 995