My father returned home from a very important business trip a few weeks ago.It was the kind of trip that involves meticulously packing several suits and ties — the kind of trip on which business executives fly in on expensive planes to have critical high-level meetings between exorbitant company-funded meals and rounds of golf. It was the kind of trip on which men with briefcases sit in ballrooms of expensive hotels and make crucial strategic decisions about the future of their businesses.My dad, a state executive of the independent insurance agents’ association — don’t worry, he doesn’t work for those evil, evil insurance companies — was meeting with his counterparts from all 50 states to discuss a matter that would revolutionize the way his company did business, pushing its interests into the information age, where it could reach new demographics and communicate with unparalleled efficiency.What my dad and his suit-clad colleagues were actually discussing was, of course, Facebook.We were eating lunch a few days after his return when he told me this. If I remember correctly, I actually started coughing up Dr. Pepper.My dad’s organization is certainly not a pioneer in this field. Businesses of all stripes and colors are turning to the Web for innovative new ways of communicating with both their customers and their employees. And because Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites are online giants — and because they are mostly inhabited by the “young people” demographic, which is the holy grail of advertising — it was only inevitable companies would start creeping into them as well.As most college students will tell you, this is, like, totally lame.The basic premise of corporate America’s forays into social networking is fundamentally flawed. Businesspeople love the word “networking” almost as much as they love the word “profit,” and they may think connecting on a “social” level would be useful, but they simply don’t get what sites like Facebook are about.Of course young people like Facebook. We like it because we can chat with our friends and post goofy pictures on their walls. We like it because we can compare music tastes and post pictures of our friends making fools of themselves.But, most importantly, we like it because it isn’t work. In fact, anybody who has ever set foot on a college campus knows Facebook is pretty much the anti-work.Besides, have you ever seen a grown-up’s Facebook page? It’s like Andy Griffith found himself a computer-box.To be fair, the “old people” wouldn’t be making the pages. They would hire young, hip kids barely out of college to carefully construct their pages, paying a salary to make sure their social networking apparatus is fully immersed in the lingo, the cool stuff, whatever those crazy kids are into these days. Which is really the fundamental problem with a corporate invasion of online social networks — it’s a waste of time and money. There’s already a perfect system to contact people about business-related matters. It’s faster and easier to navigate than Facebook. It allows you as many characters as you need to say something rational and informational, unlike Twitter.It’s called e-mail.Yes, e-mail is impersonal. Yes, e-mail is boring. It’s supposed to be.Businessmen have a kind of twisted Midas touch — everything they lay their hands on turns to lame. If they begin to insinuate themselves any deeper into social networks, it will begin, as it always does, to mutate them into the same advertising-saturated, cautiously soulless world of corporate America, where individuality is forsaken in the name of more demographics to be shuffled through the corporate machinery as quickly and efficiently as possible.And once that process happens, Facebook will die. Maybe it won’t disappear, but it will become another faceless wasteland of cautious wording and impersonal communication. Businesses will have no use for it at that point. And they’ll have killed all of our fun in the process.Matthew Albright is a 21-year-old mass communication junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_malbright.– – – -Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]