I&#x27;m often the person making that argument, so only seems fair I take a crack at this.<p><pre><code>    &gt; 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the
    &gt; point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I
    &gt; still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them
    &gt; over email&#x2F;gchat&#x2F;texting&#x2F;in person.
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There&#x27;s a few factors, but let&#x27;s start with &quot;low interaction friendship&quot;. When I log in to Facebook, there&#x27;s a post from a guy who lives in a different country to me, who I met on a bus 8 years ago, posting about his crusade to stop his vet offering homeopathy(!). I see an update once every two or three days from this guy, but we&#x27;re not really close enough to send each other regular emails or messages. But last time we were in the same city, I sent him a message, and we had dinner, drinks, and went to a show. I listened to his latest album a few years back, and as a result, we had him play at our wedding. I have a <i>lot</i> of low-interaction friends like this, and they enrich my life incredibly. I would not have the mental energy or time to maintain lots of friendships like this by email.<p>I have a reasonably large extended family. We could start up a mailing list, but we&#x27;re not all related to the same people. When I see them in person, I have been &quot;keeping in touch&quot; because I&#x27;ve been seeing their family photos, seeing daily updates from them, and interacting with them. Again, I don&#x27;t have the time or energy to do this actively.<p>We have a party organized this weekend. There are 40 people on the invite list. A Facebook event has meant that we&#x27;ve invited a whole load of people who we might not have invited to a more intimate event, but also that we got suggestions for a bunch of people to invite - we went through our friends list, and often thought &quot;haven&#x27;t seen Joe in ages! I&#x27;d forgotten he was in town, let&#x27;s invite him&quot;. Facebook has kept track of who&#x27;s coming for us, and will gently nag our guests to reply either way. We don&#x27;t have cellphone numbers of email addresses for many of these people.<p>Conversely, a couple we don&#x27;t know very well has invited us to an event in a fortnight. We&#x27;re not that close to them, but we can see on Facebook that a whole bunch of our mutual friends who we do really really like are going. As a result, we&#x27;ll probably go.<p>Many of these things are <i>possible</i> without Facebook, they&#x27;re just much much harder, and we probably wouldn&#x27;t bother.<p><pre><code>    &gt; 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively
    &gt; to facebook as their sole communication method? This
    &gt; hasn&#x27;t meshed with my experience, but I&#x27;m in a very
    &gt; limited population strata. As a followup, do these
    &gt; people find any difficulties when connecting with
    &gt; non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?
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Yes. Facebook Messenger is the primary way I communicate socially with people. If I happen to have everyone&#x27;s cellphone, I&#x27;ll use WhatsApp, as it has a few more useful features, and not everyone has Messenger installed, but generally FB Messenger is how I communicate with people, as it&#x27;s a constant, even when they move country, change numbers, change email, whatever. I ran in to some old high school friends at a university alumni event recently, who I hadn&#x27;t seen in decades. I added one of them on Facebook, and he created a Messenger group with some other people we went to high school with, and we organized lunch. I could have gotten his email, and we could have done it that way, but I don&#x27;t think he had contact details for some of the other people he invited, other than Facebook.<p>I have three ex colleagues who I&#x27;d love to be more in touch with, who aren&#x27;t on Facebook. I try and see them when I am in the same city as them, but I often forget they&#x27;re around, and because I&#x27;m not up to date with what&#x27;s going on in their lives, we often have less to talk about.<p><pre><code>    &gt; 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you&#x2F;most people
    &gt; you know? e.g. is there even a thought of &quot;Am I happy
    &gt; with the tradeoffs at hand to use this&quot; or is it just
    &gt; the accepted dogma at this point.
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Not as far as I know. People who aren&#x27;t on Facebook are the big exception, and they tend to be the slightly kookier people.<p>The trade-offs seem hard to articulate. I don&#x27;t feel like my social graph is particularly private. There are plenty of things that I do like to keep private, but Facebook knowing who my friends and family are isn&#x27;t really one of them.<p>Anyway, hope this wall of text helps a little.