of facebook.com

This will, in all probability, be yet another one of those posts you will have read about the evils of yet-another-social-networking-site. But for awhile now I've been
thinking about it - thinking about how annoying it is that I dislike these sites and yet still persist in signing up, logging on, and updating it every so often.
I mean, why?

I have an account on Friendster. I didn't have MySpace. Because having Myspace was a little bit like having GameCube (kinda cute, but universally reviled).

A year ago, I thought, nah, I don't need yet-another-social-networking-blah, but then when Emily got on it and sent me an invite, I gave in. Lost touch with her since 4 yrs ago.

And then I noticed that, hey, Facebook is actually pretty enjoyable, given that Friendster has this terribly slow, buggy interface; and totally random people
could send you gross, pervy messages that take about a week for you to receive. Facebook is private; only your direct contacts to access any of your information.

Little by little people who knew me by that particular email address started adding me; and then word gets out in the office, or in social circle(same thing) since everybody's talking about such-and-such a person's friend, and the little links start being made, and suddenly I have 90+ friends.

I didn't think I had that many friends. I'm eternally amazed by those people who have 450 friends or something.

But that isn't really the point.

What makes me uncomfortable is when people I barely know, people from years ago during a time when I was grappling with my identity and my persistently low self-esteem, people from when I was actually embarassed to be me, start showing up. And some of them "want to be [my] friend". I want to say, I'm not the person you know anymore. But I'm too polite to turn them down.

There are people I don't talk to anymore, and there's a reason why I don't talk to them anymore. Why put up a farce of an imagined relationship out there for the world to see? I want to be able to pick and choose who my "friends" are; I want to have a say in who I want to continue to have a relationship with, instead of simply gritting my teeth and clicking "approve".

So maybe I'm an anti-social bastard. I mean, it is a great way to keep in touch with people. But I have this blog. I have MSN, and ICQ, and email; I have two phone numbers, a home address, an office address. You know where I live, where I work. I wish it were enough.

This is merely a widening in the range of possible relationships we can have. Rather
than simply having an inner circle of best buds (whom we chat with on the phone), and an outer circle of random acquaintances (who leave us impersonal messages wherever), we have an amorphous cloud of particles that are sometimes stuck to the centre, and at other times floating right at the edge of our consciousness.

It's a good sort of flexibility. I'm putting myself out there for other people to pick and choose who I am to them. And I suppose I do the same in return. So maybe I'm not an anti-social bastard, but rather a crazed control-freak.

Posted by R