Core77’s Allan Chochinov, upon whom we have lavished praise in posts past, has pointed us to an essay by Design Observer’s Jessica Helfand, who’s likewise been the object of some admiration in these pages. Jessica’s subject: Facebook. And what an uncanny coincidence that is.

Writes Jessica,

For anyone under the age of, say thirty or so, the whole notion of open-source thinking is a native habitat that can be applied to everything from group-table seating in restaurants to sharing playlists to data clouds…

Quite. With equal parts wit and insight, Jessica’s article teases out the divers complexities and contradictions that attend this networked culture, in which we create and recreate a series of public personae for ourselves via the internet. The word “design” does not appear in her article; it doesn’t have to. She’s writing about nothing less than the design of life.

Turns out, the very perception of what is public versus what is private is a fundamentally generational conceit.

Again, swell. But as it happens, we—some of we, anyway—are late to the party. We just joined Facebook this week. (Note the conspicuously absent link in that last line.)

We’ve been reluctant to do so, despite the fact that we belong to the very generation that Jessica impugns with an instinctive facility for the kind of socialization that Facebook was made for. Like beads of mercury, persons of our age cohort are supposed to glom together into a single digital body, sharing, over-sharing, ditching outmoded standards of privacy. So where the hell have we been keeping ourselves?

We are not incurable Luddites. (Though we have reason to be.) We are definitely not antisocial. (Where were we last night?) And what’s more we have a pronounced artistic and philosophical preference for performance and self-invention, which Facebook, in Jessica’s view, encourages—we’re for Wilde, Whitman, Mishima, Corb.

But we’re also for Loos, O’Hara, Celine and Eisenman. That is, in order: We don’t want to design our lives completely; we like the poetics of the real; we feel entitled to a hearty misanthropy; and we recognize (thanks, 1970’s Peter!) that the products of technology are boring to anyone who’s either grown accustomed to them or grown weary of the parade of novelty that a technological culture produces. How long till Facebook is an embarrassment, like MySpace or Friendster? Jessica’s right to be skeptical about social networking sites. But not everybody under the age of 30 digs them. We caved for professional reasons only, and we’re not too happy about it.

My Facebook, My Self [Design Observer]