I never realized just how much traffic my 377 digital acquaintances created on Facebook. Wall postings. Breakups. Make-ups. Let's not forget the photo albums, movie and music profile updates, new friends, parties and groups.

I didn't ask for it. I didn't want it. Regardless -- I got it. On Sept. 4, Facebook turned a halogen spotlight on the dim backyard of my online social life.

I was more into Facebook once upon a time earlier in my college career, but my interests, music, movies, photo albums and basically everything but my e-mail address exited stage right soon after I became an upper classman years. When I made the switch from techno-extrovert to techno-introvert, it was because of the prospect of so many people I knew so informally knowing so much about me, especially as my extended network included scores of people who I hadn't spoken to since high school, and not all of them close friends. I could have taken them off I suppose, but, my passion for watching untouchably popular people from high school train wreck in college is just too great.

And, so, the past few days I bore witness to one of the most illuminating social phenomenon of our times -- American society came full circle. The small town atmosphere lost in the Industrial Revolution, only rural areas away from the suburban fortresses of the Northeast and West Coast enjoyed the kind of social cohesion that used to exist before ConAgra and Wal-Mart dominated, sucked up, digested and passed as waste half the free world's small businesses after three or four painful days in the bathroom.

No longer! Now every college student barricaded into a dorm room can enjoy the buzz off a double-shot of gossip every morning before breakfast without the social inconvenience of getting to know more than a handful of people on their floor. The small town environment has returned.

The feature that makes it all possible, as we all know, is the News Feed.

"It's so, like, stalkerish!" Goes the new battle cry. Compared to what? The old Facebook? No, there's only one major difference between the new and the old Facebook -- the new one forces you to think of all the people you don't know who'll dissect your actions, instead of all the people you don't know whose profiles you laugh at with your friends in between classes. Not that there's anything wrong with gawking at terrible photo albums or procrastination, but, you know, God forbid someone gawk or procrastinate at the expense of your image. Or, well, mine.

I join the masses in my denouncement of the most nefarious initiative yet in Facebook's laundry list of privacy invasions. I don't buy the "well you signed up for it" argument. Facebook has a monopoly on a free and mostly public communication channel it can benefit from in the form of advertising revenue. There's a responsibility there. Or maybe there isn't. Well, whatever, it's free.

Facebook's CEO responded to the groups online, and there's hope for an improved feature: "The safeguards, expected as early as Friday, would let users block from feeds entire categories -- such as changes to the groups they belong to -- while still allowing people to observe such changes by visiting the profile page. Before, a user had to remove items one at a time from their personal feeds."

The massive reaction to the News Feature that elicited the response was as immediate as it was fascinating. It went up on Monday. By Thursday at the time of this writing, nearly 900,000 people of the 9 million registered users across more than 40,000 regional, work, college and high school networks had joined. In three days, hundreds of thousands of people who did not know each other came together under a common goal to protest something they were passionate about. It was stunning. It was also inspiring, for very important reasons. The global Facebook groups have only begun stretching their legs -- as convenient as it is for my entire Semester at Sea study abroad program to reunite in a single group that spans a few hundred college networks, there are broader and more important implications.

Within the anti-News Feed group, discussions on topics ranging from religion to politics to the asinine sprang up and contracted thousands of posts, most of the conversations played out minute-by-minute. A great positive feature of the News Feed emerged -- the only reason people were able to discover the group so quickly and join it was the simple fact that they knew as soon as they logged in that all their friends were flocking to it.

In days, one-ninth of the entire population of Facebook was in a single group. What if it was something important? The nature of college protests have moved off the quad and onto the Internet. We're passionate and opinionated, but we're invisible. The online medium needs to expand to influence people who don't understand the Internet.

Guaranteed, Facebook will be an indicator for the next Presidential election, and there's a huge reason the News Feed may play a factor -- consolidation. There are over 20 groups pushing a Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert ticket for the 2008 election. For important issues that function better as one giant group instead of many small ones, the News Feed allows them to find out about each other on the fly and consolidate. From abortion to gun control to national elections -- could we see a Facebook revolution?

Social movements have always held a power, voting doesn't. We shouldn't be against the feed entirely -- the community on Facebook is now exponentially stronger and more mobile, and that's an amazing addition to the phenomenon. Sociologists may be playing catch up for years.