Facebook has come under fire lately, in part due to the millions of users who have followed a chain-mail-like trend of posting notes containing 25 random facts about themselves.

A writer for Time magazine described this phenomenon as a ”bout of viral narcissism.” And a writer for Relevant magazine took things a bit further, arguing in his article ”The Death of Facebook” that these 25-things postings epitomize everything that’s wrong with Facebook, which he describes as “stoking the coals of our inflamed narcissism” and “(making) ‘communion’ with people little more than highly self-conscious, intricately schemed, situational performances wherein we control what, when, where, and how much of ourselves people can know.”

I’m sure Facebook can enable these things. But I think assuming that everyone who uses it is motivated by narcissism is painting millions of people with too broad a brush. It overlooks all that Facebook offers that isn’t about showing off some kind of calculated version of ourselves.

I have deactivated my Facebook account a couple of times, not because I thought having an account showed me to be too self-absorbed but rather because it proved to be too much of a distraction when I had finals to study for or was battling bad writer’s block. But both times, I ended up missing Facebook after several weeks or months – not because I was bothered by the fact that the world no longer had easy access to lists of my favorite books and movies but because I didn’t want to wait until the one time a year I see my cousin to see her vacation photos. I wondered if my former co-worker had had her baby. I missed the surprise of seeing that someone I’d gone to high school with had gotten engaged.

Of course, learning these things about people isn’t the same as having relationships with them. But the fact that I no longer have a relationship with my best friend from elementary school doesn’t mean I’m not interested in knowing what she’s doing now. Being Facebook friends doesn’t make us real friends again, but Facebook does at least answer “I wonder whatever happened to” kinds of questions.

I kind of wish I didn’t have these kinds of questions. I wish I didn’t get so much enjoyment out of random, Facebook-enabled discoveries such as that my best friend, who I know from high school, happens to know one of my co-workers from college. If coming across tidbits like this didn’t appeal to me, I could hate (or at least pretend to hate) Facebook, too, and that would be a much edgier position to take.

But I still say that even in its edginess, the belief that Facebook’s popularity is fueled primarily by self-absorption is wrong. After all, that 25-things posting would never have taken off like it did if people weren’t at least a little interested in learning about someone beyond themselves.