It's all about me - and my entourage.

Joe Diorio, 53, of Chesterbrook, is one such not-brand-new Facebook-user. He published a "25 Random Things About Me" list recently. How come? "Just for laughs," he says. "I noticed that other people on my [Facebook] friends list had done it. And I wondered whether I could even find 25 random things about myself."

He did. He posted burningly revealing items such as:

1. I became a Red Sox Fan in 1967. . . .

2. Of meeting his wife: She talked to me first; I was too chicken to say anything to her. . . .

9. I was a security guard at a cigarette lighter factory. I worked the graveyard shift and would sit in the guardhouse smoking cigarettes . . . about 50 feet from a 60,000-cubic-foot butane tank.

10. Item #9 proves God protects fools.

Diorio's list is followed by comments from his Facebook friends, often, in turn, commented on by Diorio.

Clive Thompson, contributing editor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and columnist for Wired, says society is "redrawing the boundary between public and private, and in some respects, it's the most significant intergenerational cultural shift since rock-and-roll. People separated by only five years of age are looking at each other, completely baffled by their behavior."

There are certainly downsides. Christine Rosen of the New Atlantis, "a journal of technology and society," reminds us by e-mail that narcissism is narcissism: "For all of their apparently casual tone, these lists are not filled with random things. They are carefully and deliberately crafted efforts to market their makers as quirky and appealing people. The revelation of one person's quirks can be endearing, but the broadcasting of hundreds of thousands of people's quirks quickly devolves into tedious mass solipsism."

And the social-networking scene can invite and involve true mental problems. In his commentary Monday morning on WHYY-FM, Dan Gottlieb worried about the "delusion" that we must be "always connected." Rightly did he warn: "It is a delusion."

As family therapist Sara Kay Smullens points out, people can fly to Facebook or other sites to avoid their flesh-and-blood family and friends. "It can be a substitute, one that doesn't work, for an intimacy they can't find in real life," she says.

"Random Things" lister Diorio has his own theory about why the lists and commentaries have become so popular. It has a piquant irony: "We spend so much of our lives online with Facebook, LinkedIn, and we spend so much time connected that we feel disconnected. So we tell people these little things, to feel more connected. We put a piece of ourselves out there, to give it a try."

Is there no turning back? Nussbaum says the networked world and invisible entourage are with us forever, "unless somebody pulls the plug, and we're all in the streets, trying to keep our hands warm."

or jtimpane@aol.com.