I don’t care what anyone says; Facebook isn’t dead. I am an avid user of the famed social network and it is extremely helpful when it comes to staying up-to-date on events in my peers’ lives. The surplus of characters on Facebook makes it much easier to keep in touch with friends who are in college or who live across the country. The details of events like getting a new job or getting accepted into a choice college are lost in Twitter’s 140-character limit, the caption culture on Instagram, and the six-second limit on Vine.

Twitter limits characters even in its direct messages and requires both parties to be following one another before they can message each other. Facebook allows its users to send messages to people they may not even be friends with. This messaging function can allow people to reconnect with former acquaintances they may not have spoken to in years.

If anything is dead, it’s the willingness of human beings to communicate. I would love it if the most exciting letters in my mailbox were from friends instead of colleges, but Facebook is definitely a suitable electronic form of the open letter. I would much rather future generations learn history by reading long Facebook statuses instead of by reading tweets from Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber or following a hyperlink to a scumbag tabloid that is considered news.

I don’t want the future generation’s grammar lessons to be the appropriate uses of hashtags or the correct format of live-tweeting. I fear that interaction will eventually be completely limited to 140 characters or less. The decade-old Facebook might be losing its appeal in the world of pop culture, but its users’ abilities to post long statuses and updates may be the only thing that keeps communication alive now and in the future.