Listening to NPR the other day to Hal Niedzviecki, blogger and author to Peep Diaries, I decided I am interested in his perspective on the new “social” exposure on networks. Recently I was asked to join yet another social network so I could keep track of a former co-worker who I haven’t spoken to in two years. If I join (which I won’t), I will be a member of 5 different social networks, which apparently are helping me keep in touch with friends and colleagues while networking for future career options.Honestly, I am overwhelmed with keeping in touch. Throughout my brief life, I found difficulties picking up the phone to just “chat” unless I had prepared something interesting to talk about. As I get older, I notice that my major events I could talk about are few and far between. When the question arises, “What have you been up to?” the response, “Same as usual.”
So I joined Facebook last summer as a way to stay “in touch” with people I was working with at Stanford. I experienced the initial rush and excitement of finding people I haven’t seen in several years or people I haven’t talked to since high school. Then comes the voyeurism—I want to befriend you just to see where you have gone in life, but do I really care about you now? But I believe you befriend me to do that same life-check. Will we chat? Most likely not. So currently I have about 100 friends, but I could shave about 20 off and we wouldn’t notice any change to our lives. I currently have a friend request that I don’t really want to accept because I haven’t talk to this person in 12 years and we were not that close 12 years ago. Interesting predicament: choosing “friends”. The blogger and author shared on the NPR piece that he decided to throw a party and invite all his 800 Facebook friends, partly to see them, partly to experiment with the friend aspect of Facebook. Only 1 showed up.
So, do we really have friends? I screen away students from Facebook for hopefully obvious reasons, and my contacts are mostly family. I check Facebook in a drug-like fashion (what is new?) along with Multiply, the various blogs I follow, LinkedIn, Ning.com, JPG Magazine, and the list goes on. Maybe I need to unplug for a while.
