So a while ago, I yielded to peer pressure and got a Facebook account. Feel free to add me or whatever. (Or don’t; it’s really not a big deal, as I’m about to get into)
While it’s kind of a neat idea, and there’s an initial sense of “Hey, cool!”, I don’t think Facebook is entirely for me. I just don’t have that many friends, you see.
I don’t say that in a “oh, pity me!” sort of way. It’s just kind of factual: I never feel like I have much in common with most people. I feel little or no connection with 97% of the people I meet, and I don’t even meet a lot of people; I’m quite socially awkward, and though I can fake a bit of social functionality, the prospect of going to a gathering with more than three or four people I don’t know makes my stomach churn and I just want to go and hide in the dark somewhere. It probably doesn’t help that I have a slight fear of people I do like rejecting me for reasons I can’t adequately explain.
Facebook, to a certain extent, is about reconnecting with old friends, or networking with current ones. The latter seems a bit pointless, since I can just email or phone the people I’m friends with now. Granted, significant portions of the internet are pretty pointless, so it’s not really a big deal. I suppose it’s handy to have a sort of personal forum for having get-togethers and whatnot.
But do I really want to reconnect with people from my past? For the most part, one loses touch with people for a reason: At some point, it just became more effort than it was worth to pick up the phone or send an email. That’s not a lot of effort, either. Many of the people I used to know are just in another world right now: I was friends with them because of circumstances, whether it was history class or university residence. While I don’t have any regrets, and hold very few personal grudges, I also lack the will to pursue many reacquaintances: In my experience, you tend to run out of things to say after the intial round of “Good-to-see-you-what-have-you-been-doing-remember-when…” dies off. Most of those old friendships are a product of circumstances, and there’s not a lot left once those circumstances evaporate. Every now and then someone comes along and you think “Yeah, there’s still a connection”, but I don’t know what the percentage is. It’s not high, I suspect.
I don’t really mean to sound so curmudgeonly. Facebook is an amusing diversion with occasional real benefits, even if it does lead to periodic bouts of “Geez, I have nothing to say to so-and-so.” But ultimately, I think this blog is far more rewarding. Granted, I have no idea who most of my readers are. But I know there’s a handful of people who come back semi-regularly, even though they don’t know me beyond what I write in this space, and every now and then someone finds it interesting enough to link to. That, I think, is more valuable than someone getting in touch with me after 10 years because they saw my profile listed on the net.
See? There was a cheerful moral to the story after all. I love you all, in a totally casual, non-committal, internet kind of way.