For those rare few among us who were on Facebook in those early days, waaaaay back in late 2003, you no doubt grumble from time to time about its meteoric growth from a dorm room gossip site into a digital nation of 400 million inhabitants.

In the latest edition of The New York Review of Books Charles Petersen looks back at the bad old days of Facebook. His article, “In the World of Facebook,” is a characteristically insightful and thorough look at the cultural phenomenon, with particular attention to Facebook’s elitist origins at Harvard, its later “suburbanization,” and now the privacy issues and its impact on advertising.

Here’s a glimpse:

The site was a lark. For all that it reduced personality to a series of “position takings” and changed the word “friend” from a noun, something defined by duration, to a verb—”I friended him,” a one-off event—the early Facebook nonetheless appeared as a natural extension of the atmosphere of college, where everlasting friendship often seems as simple as making another late-night dorm-room acquaintance, and whether one names Jane Austen among one’s favorite authors, or removes Charlotte Brontë from the list, can seem enormously important, deeply representative of one’s shifting personality.