In my brain this week, things that have been mediated to me and/or processed through technology include: the oil well sealed, Snooki’s astonishing orange glo, creepy Glen on Mad Men, Prop 8 struck down, Arcade Fire live from Madison Square Garden, Chelsea Clinton getting married, Facebook photos of my baby niece and nephew, Anne Rice quitting Christianity, Netflix film that I can’t even remember, and Pat Robertson’s son asking me about “hepcats” on the 700 Club. Not to mention the many ichats, skype chats, text conversations and phone calls that are too numerous to even recall.

This past week, Facebook users had another one of their patented uprisings, this time crying foul over the purportedly confounding privacy settings that make it hard for people to switch away from the “everyone sees everything” default settings. Out of anger about the great “invasion of privacy” phantom, thousands of users have vowed to delete their Facebook accounts in protest.

It was enough to force Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to call a press conference, apologize, and institute changes such as requiring only minimal information to be visible when people search for others (name, profile picture, and gender). Facebook had earlier required users to make more of their information public.

The debate has been raging for more than a year now, but until Sunday night when the Senate’s health care bill finally passed, the discourse had largely been the domain of political junkies, Fox News Tea Partiers, and otherwise outspoken partisans. The rest of us were minding our own business, unsure exactly what was in the legislation and certainly ill-suited to comment on the whole enterprise in any sort of intelligent way.

But not anymore! The minute–literally, the minute–the House of Representatives passed the bill–which will cost an estimated $940 billion over 10 years and expand health care to 32 million more Americans–people who had been largely silent on the matter began to get very loud about it on Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other social media (Google Buzz?) they might have had at their disposal.

September 19 was a dark day for me… but one that I feared would come soon enough.

I joined Twitter.

This is after years and years of publicly campaigning against it in articles such as “The Problem of Pride in the Age of Twitter” and “Short Attention Span Faith.”

And now I am a part of the monster, feeding it like everyone else…