Facebook recently changed the layout of its home page. To no one’s surprise, everyone hates it. Every change in Facebook’s design, organization, or configuration has come as a major upheaval to users whose “status updates” convey their confusion, exasperation, and outrage at the nerve of the administrators. It’s just a slight change in how the content on your home page is displayed—what’s the big deal?

But the fact is, Facebook is a big deal. Facebook is a big deal whether you are a junkie or choose to ignore it. Facebook and its ilk—MySpace, Twitter, and so many others—are changing the rules of social interaction. I remember the very moment I was introduced to Facebook. I was in college, living with 5 friends and in the midst of becoming myself when one of my roommates introduced me to it. I wasn’t in the very first batch of users, but I was initiated fairly early on.

I loved it. As I said, I was in the middle of becoming myself, and excited about it. And now I could share it with the whole wide world! Dating became a snap. Have your eye on someone and need to know their sexual orientation, relationship status, and political and religious bent before proceeding? Just look it up on Facebook—there’s no need to waste time on a date or three. I reconnected with childhood friends and high school buddies, and became “friends” with fellow participants in summer programs before I met them.

I carried on in a happy relationship with Facebook for a couple of years before it exploded. Now it is bigger than ever, with more and more users and more and more features, and of course there is only one sensible reaction. Panic. Reading the sensationalist headlines about how Facebook will turn your kid’s brain kumquat or some such I got pretty tired. Again—what is the big deal?

But then, when I joined Facebook I was 20. How would I have dealt with it at 12? The horrifically awful braces-and-glasses pictures, the agonizing “relationships”, the fleeting friendships, all displayed online for the world to see? I had some pretty nasty fights with friends in junior high school, how might they have played out in cyber space? What about the “break-ups” I found so devastating? A secret “de-friending” from a boy who just crushed me probably would have seemed like the end of the world to me.

As I read more about it, the issue that seems the most pressing is bullying. Whether you were the perpetrator (which I sometimes was) or the victim (which I also sometimes was) we all dealt with bullying at some point. What happens when it goes global? I read an article recently about some junior high school kids getting in trouble at school for creating a group “Eric is a Hairy Beast.” Complete with cell phone pictures and anecdotes, the group’s sole purpose was to torment a boy at school. Of course in any generation kids will make fun of other kids, but I think the public humiliation of cyber bullying is worse.

And bullying isn’t the only problem. High schoolers (and indeed, many of my peers) often show remarkable lack of judgment in what they post online. Drunk pictures, obscene quotes, photos in various stages of undress, and far, far, Too Much Information may seem tame when you think you’re just sharing it with your friends. But what goes online stays online, and even after you change your mind about something you posted it’s pretty much impossible to make it go away forever. One thing is for sure: I do not envy the presidential candidates of 2044.

As everyone who has been through it knows, adolescence is a time of huge change. And not just in fashion sense and music tastes, research shows that adolescence includes a rate of brain development on par with toddlers’. In fact, researchers now believe that the brain doesn’t reach complete maturity until the mid-twenties. As someone currently living her mid-twenties, I’d have to say my personal experience leads me to believe that is true. After a decade of thinking I was all grown up, I think it’s only been in the past year or so that I really have gotten close.

After giving it some thought, I can understand parents’ concerns for young peoples’ use of Facebook. But I still don’t think panic is quite the right reaction. Because what the alarmist viewpoints don’t take into consideration is that the times are changing. Online social networking is changing how we interact and it will never be the same as it was before. Of course it looks scary, when you look at today’s situation with yesterday’s rules. But if every politician in 50 years has drunk pictures from spring break in Cancun, what will happen then? Maybe, just maybe, no one will care.

Of course I still think it’s a good idea to be prudent about what one posts online. It is also definitely a good idea for parents to be involved in their child’s online life and make sure it doesn’t cross into legitimately harmful behavior. But beyond that, I think we can all calm down. The times are changing, and the wise change along with them. There may be growing pains, reminiscence for the good old days, or worry about the unknown future, but that’s how change is. We’ll be just fine.