It's called "25 Random Things About Me." It lives on Facebook, the popular social-networking Web site. It's a list you fill with 25 items of personal information, ranging from the trivial to the intimate.
Trivial: "I hate tuna." Personal: "Part of me hasn't grown past the moment of my father's death." Intimate: "I have been unfaithful, but so far it hasn't mattered much."
You send your "25 Random Things" chain-letter-style to 25 friends, and they fill it out and tag 25 others, and . . .
And soon Facebook - a virtual living room where people hang out and tell everyone else what they're doing and thinking - is awash with personal revelations, admissions, info once kept private.
Facebook turned five Feb. 4. Sometime in mid-January, "25 Random Things" became a wildfire fad there.
Many have called Web lists such as "25 Random Things" narcissism, a word that means egocentrism, with its not-so-great overtones. But Facebook users and experts are saying: Not so fast. Of course, ego is involved. But "25 Random Things" is a product of the information age. And that age is simply different from what went before.
If they are right, "25 Random Things" reveals a decisive shift in our society, and there's no going back. Many of us - younger, mostly - take a distinctive view of private and public, in which a permanent, always-connected audience trades personal, even intimate, information as part of having friends and being social. That hyperconnected life is here to stay. Call this narcissism, but it might be that the train left and you weren't on it.
Facebook spokespeople say that they do not keep statistics on members' activity, but that membership, and the use of "Notes" (where "25 Random Things" lives), spiked last month.
In general, "I really get a kick out of reading" the "25 Things" lists, Nadia Stylianou, 23, a Facebook user from New York, says (via Facebook, of course). "It's usually a test of someone's comedic skills, with a touch of selected personal facts that the person really wants the community to know about themselves."
Marta Abel, 23, of Basking Ridge, N.J., says she likes the lists because "I really enjoy learning about my friends."
