Joanna Weiss

Facebook angst for the millions

Most of us are on the outside, looking in, with a feeling that the balance isn’t right

By Joanna Weiss

Globe Columnist / February 7, 2012

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Hype about Facebook’s impending IPO was everywhere you looked last week: Analysis of proper valuation, laundry lists of who will reap the most, from Mark Zuckerberg to his investors to the guy who took stock as payment for painting murals at Facebook headquarters. And with it, among a lot of people I know, has come a related phenomenon of Facebook Angst, consisting of several concurrent realizations: 1) Some people are about to get extraordinarily rich. 2) This group does not include me. 3) Why didn’t I see how much the world was going to change? Plenty of folks, it turns out, have reason to feel left behind when a company like Facebook hits the stratosphere. There are analog people who didn’t anticipate the speed and breadth of the digital world. (As a newspaper-industry exile reminded me, the papers once did what Facebook does, just more slowly: People clipped stories, sent them to friends, discussed them in the coffeeshop. Old school!)

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