Isn’t it something to find old friends online? To remember those old memories you shared, to add them to your social networking mini-site, and have them ignore or just to merely confirm a friendship…. It strikes me that this is something unique to this generation. I sneer at the designation I heard at a friend’s graduation just a couple of days ago, that this is the “MySpace Generation”—no, the last label that meant anything was Gen-X, so give it up and shut your mouth. Nevertheless, it makes me think, isn’t it funny that this wasn’t a consideration just a hundred years ago? You lose touch with people after high school, and that’s it; you might run into each other after that, but it would be considered a minor miracle, and have extreme weight attached to it. Not too long ago, a best friend’s little sister added me to one of these social networking sites, a girl I hadn’t seen in probably twelve years or so.
What is it that makes these social networking sites so popular? What is it that MySpace taps into that we’re all about? Is it the personality that we get to convey? Sure, geeks mock it, but we’re supposed to: of course these sites aren’t proper HTML, of course they’re obnoxious, of course they’re poorly designed, but they are some peoples’ only web presence. What about the good part of these sites? Behind the bling, behind the pseudonyms, behind the glittery GIFs and quasipornographic personal images lurk real people, people you and I used to know, and have forgotten. Isn’t that something?
But what good is it, and what impact does this have on the future, if any? I wonder if it doesn’t help de-romanticize our pasts. High school suddenly seems a lot less “back then” when you know what all your former colleagues are doing now, doesn’t it?
Technorati Tags: friendship, aging, psychology, social networking
