Being critical of social media, nowadays, is like shouting "stop" at a speeding freight train: Don't expect to make much of an impression. The same is true for observations about modern society in general, where trends emerge and unfold on such a huge scale that all the individual can do is take note of them (and maybe cynically cash in, if blessed with an entrepreneurial bent). But I am all about being quixotic. Just show me the windmill and I'll tilt, baby, I'll tilt! And with Thanksgiving approaching, I thought I'd take a look at the bigger "social" implications of …

Now that MySpace has thrown in the towel and acknowledged Facebook's total supremacy on turf it once owned, it may be a good time to revisit News Corp.'s decision to buy the once-great, now-humbled social network. Was it a good idea? Did they at least break even? To do so, of course, is to question the judgment of the almighty Murdoch -- to suggest, even, that Rupert may be fallible. Honestly, we'll probably never know for sure whether Murdoch regrets buying MySpace, or views it as an acceptable loss, or thinks of it as an interesting experiment which served its …

The real power of social media is sometimes best illustrated by an unexpected convergence with another discipline -- in this case, scientific investigation. And it can't hurt when the subject under investigation is that universal comical Internet meme, the kitty cat. Enter social media: unsurprisingly, there are innumerable videos on YouTube showing cats of all sizes drinking, from lions filmed by tourists on safari to the tens of thousands -- nay, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions -- of videos that people have uploaded of their house pets.

A few months ago police in the town of Evesham, NJ made headlines with a social media strategy which includes what is basically a Facebook perp walk -- that is, posting mug shots from recent arrests online, complete with identifying information and their alleged transgressions. Predictably the policy stirred some controversy, with critics warning against the potential for inappropriate photo-tagging, but that hasn't deterred Evesham police from continuing the Facebook photo flagellation. Now police in other parts of the country are getting in on the act.

First there was the ancestral environment, way back in the Great Rift Valley days, one million years ago: early human beings live in semi-nomadic groups of no more than a few dozen individuals. Cue "Thus Spake Zarathustra" from "2001: A Space Odyssey," and fast forward to the modern world: human beings live in towns and cities composed of millions of individuals, most of whom they will never meet and are determined to ignore. Fast forward a little more: human beings can now use online social networks to become "friends" with hundreds or even thousands of people they will never meet, …

Lately social media seems to lend itself to strange, Zen-like denials of apparently obvious truths. In September we found out that Twitter isn't a social network, according to Kevin Thau, the site's vice-president for business and corporate development. Now Google has formulated its own paradox to instruct and bewilder. Responding to questions from reporters at the Monaco Media Forum about its rumored social media push to compete with Facebook, Hugo Barra, Google's head of mobile product development said: "We're not working on a social network platform that's just going to be another social network platform."

Storing the minute, up-to-date details of 600 million lives takes a lot of memory and a lot of power. According to Facebook, users add 100 million new photos every day and share more than 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook each month. Factor in its continued breakneck growth rate, and the world's largest social network needs more data storage, and soon. With its latest move, Facebook joins Google and Apple, which built data centers in western North Carolina after being wooed by cheap land and tax incentives from friendly state and county governments.

Scarcely a week goes by without the news media circulating a questionable, but highly reportable, study purporting to document the ills caused by social media. This week is no exception: the latest entry comes from Case Western Reserve's School of Medicine, with a study warning that excessive use of social media -- specifically, "hypertexting" (sending more than 120 messages per school day) and "hypernetworking" (spending more than three hours per day on sites like Facebook) -- is linked to dangerous health problems and antisocial behavior in teens.

There's a joke about socialized medicine in here somewhere: After lagging behind other businesses because of patient privacy concerns, doctors are finally starting to use social media to communicate with patients and each other, according to the American Medical News, the trade newspaper of the American Medical Association. Indeed, the trend is significant enough that many hospitals are hiring social media managers to handle all the medical tweeting and Facebook activity.

Perhaps buoyed by the scene in the film "The Social Network" where a young Mark Zuckerberg creates FaceMash while drunk blogging about the girl who just dumped him, online security firm Webroot has created a hilarious "Social Media Sobriety Test" that assesses your chemical state of being to determine whether you should be allowed to access social media accounts and start firing off messages in the wee hours. As Webroot explains, "Nothing good happens online after 1am," and the service is intended to prevent those humiliating incidents which result from the intersection of two bottles of wine and a Blackberry, …