Matter of fact, these messages are worse than boring or trivial. They clutter up my precious "wall," make it harder to find stuff that is actually meant for me, something that might have informational value in my life. In this way they make my already confused and over-busy existence--and yes, I admit those problems are my own fault--but they make it even more confused and über-busy.

I know what you're gonna say--they're building a virtual community. Codswallop. Any community based on what I see: it's raining again, saw Jon Stewart last night, banana bread; is not worth having. Real community is like a good novel, it involves passionate characters who have something vital at stake. Banana bread doesn't come into it.

So why do people do this? Why do friends--real friends, not just Facebook "friends;" people who are creative, intelligent, principled, men and women who read Tolstoy, nurture kids, give money for Haiti--why do they spend what must be hours weekly on FB, sending and responding to comments about weather, dogs and banana bread?

The reason, I think, lies in the great American snake oil ethic. As a society of immigrants from very different cultures, we all needed a national image to identify with: specifically God, Freedom, and Mom's Apple Pie. The fact that "God" is a bad joke, true freedom is reserved for the rich, and apple pie for most has become that fat-crammed, microwaved strudel McDonald's passes off as dessert, is not the point. The image was what counted because it was something every Juan, Dick and Ari could agree on.

And maybe, in the days when we were a productive society, the snake oil was OK. It kept people together in fantasy while the real work happened; while they made galvanized steel buckets and adding machines and corn.

But few of us make stuff anymore. And because of that, I think, our national ethic has warped. We are, to a large extent, what we do, and as long as we were creating something real our sense of personal worth was also solid. Once the real jobs, the solid work were gone, all we had left to base our self-esteem on was the image.

And an image, by definition, doesn't actually do anything. Like money, it's a representation of something else, and it only has value to the extent that everyone agrees it has value.

Nowhere perhaps is the snake oil effect more visible than in our economy. The U.S. went in half a century from being the workshop of the world to an economy based mostly on buying, selling and gambling. The buying and selling happens largely through the medium of credit, the ultimate example of a symbol that carries value only as long as everyone agrees it does (credit as a percentage of gross domestic product went from 130% in the '50s to almost 340% now). The flow of credit is directed by advertising: information that represents what value others ascribe to a given product. And the gambling is done on the stock market, via banks, hedge funds and investment houses.

How is the stock market gambling? Consider this. Gizmo Inc. sells widget X (made, of course, in Shenzhen), and Gizmo's ad campaign makes X seem popular. Megabroker LLC doesn't give two hoots whether widget X is actually any damn good. What matters--what matters to Megabrokers' shareholders--is the perception that widget X is popular. Therefore Megabroker buys Gizmo shares, and Gizmo's share price rises. Other brokers, seeing this, jump on the bandwagon. Megabroker then sells the shares and makes money.

(The derivatives market--wherein, say, paper issued by Gizmo is bought and sold based on what investors think it will do at a certain point in the future--is simply a distilled and leveraged version of the general stock market casino. The total market for derivatives, by the way, both futures and over the counter, was valued at 600 trillion in 2008--roughly twelve times the value of the entire world economy.)

So how does all this relate to Facebook? Simple. People who have to tell others, every day, every hour, that they just made a banana bread, must on some level need input from others to see value in what they do.

There's no other explanation for it. It's not enough, apparently, for Joe Blow to make a banana bread that tastes good just to Joe, or maybe to his girlfriend or kids. On some level he needs to be reassured by the fact that his 126 "friends" on FB know about the banana bread too, even if they can't taste it. On some level, he needs them to validate his everyday existence.

I see this syndrome at work even in my children, both of whom (parental prejudices admitted) are creative, smart--and are allowed only limited time online. Still, when my 16-year-old comes home from a party, for example, the first thing she wants to do is log onto Facebook to check out the pictures that were taken of the event she just left--photos that her crowd must have spent much of the party time posing for and snapping. It's as if the party didn't really exist until its reality was translated into images they could post.

The common thread here is external value--what others see as value--as opposed to internal value. External value is image, whereas internal worth is based on your own needs and perceptions, what you consider to be the real utility of a good or service, thought or action. This disjunction between the two types of values is true of the stock market: the housing bubble, and the recession that followed, were built on external-value systems. But it also holds true in morality and ethics. The famous Yale test wherein subjects, giving in to peer pressure, caused actual pain to other subjects, is a clear case of external morality taking precedence over the internalized social values that told them hurting others was bad.

Which isn't to say, if you've made a banana bread that you're proud of, that it's unnatural to want to tell your friends. But to post this type of news on FB five times a day means that the internal value of banana bread is no longer the point. The point has become the image of the banana bread, and of the banana-bread maker; how many "friends" have read it, how many have "liked" Joe Blow's comment. The value has become unmoored from the actual worth of the bread in pleasing Joe's taste buds or filling his kids' stomachs.

And it's in this sense that the Facebook ethic, and the related ethic of the casino stock market, are dangerous. Sure, some value lies in gaining the support of friends, as in gauging the popularity of a given product or service. But the real intrinsic value of anything lies in the direct knowledge an individual has of it, and the benefit he or she finds in using it. This is the basis of true information, of honesty, of knowing our place in the world on both macro and micro scales. Stray too far from internal values and you start believing in bubbles. Spend too much time seeking the approval of others and you lose yourself. Fear, in many cases, is the result: fear of losing support, friends, esteem. Fear of being alone. Fear must always come when there is no internal structure to deny it breathing room. I sometimes think that fear is the pre-eminent emotion in this society.