In Grizzling about Facebook in the Australian Humanities Review Meaghan Morris starts from those overheated moral blasts from cultural conservatives about social networking such as Facebook and Twitter.

The media grizzles are well known and familiar in the Australian media, and they usually centre around gossip and narcissism and the evils of the internet. Morris says, in reference to such a blast, that:

there is always superficiality to networking on the Web', the writer opined. If Facebook ‘perhaps' helps us keep in touch with friends in faraway places, ‘making new friends and maintaining old friendships requires effort, emotional commitment and contact in the real world. Facebook is no substitute for face time.

Morris says that strong emotional sprays arise when the older media attack new media that threaten their markets, and in particular when the Murdoch newspapers wage culturally high-toned war on just those social networking sites that have been thumping MySpace, the site belonging to their proprietor.

Both politicians and the mainstream media persist in regarding social networks as exotic, which for them it is, which in turn highlights how out of touch they have become with reality. For the reality is that the net and social networking have become mainstream and connectedness is becoming a relatively mundane part of people's lives.