And no, I do not and will not Twitter. (Well, apparently I did, but my ex husband used that word 30 years ago and I don't think he meant the same thing! Twittering was usually preceded by the word Stop when coming from his lips.)
It seems to me that it is the "instant" part of instant communication that is the problem. It is a far cry from when I was back in high school and we had pen friends. For anyone who remembers the Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles, or huge chrome-encrusted cars, a pen friend was someone from another country or another province with whom you corresponded via a pen, a piece of paper and a stamp. Apparently this form of communication was used just after the wheel was invented according to anyone under 30. And it wasn't instant. I waited for weeks for a letter from that tanned handsome 17-year-old in Adelaide, Australia. And God, I was in heaven when it arrived (especially the one with the photo!).
But I digress. I am on Facebook because a friend of mine in the U.S. sent me an invite to join over a year ago. So I did ... and I promptly took myself off the next day. I was worried about my privacy. Then about five months ago, I checked the site out again. I found I had not "killed" myself off as I had thought. The residue of my profile was still lurking there.
So I thought what the hell, and dove in with gusto. It became a challenge to find anyone to add to my list and when I actually had THREE friends, I was overwhelmed at my own popularity. Then I started to look for other people I knew from the past...imagine when I checked some of their profiles and found they had 4,245,699 friends! OK, a slight exaggeration -- but Facebook users having 300 friends is not uncommon. Three-hundred friends...sure! Even the Dalai Lama doesn't have 300 friends. Followers maybe, but not friends.
Which brings us to the word "friend". Who are we kidding here...no one has that many friends. It has become a bit of a game on these social networking sites to see how many people you can add to your score list.
I am up to somewhere in the high 20s...I think I have 27 "friends" at this point. Some are former business contacts, others who just wandered into my world by accident, some are friends of friends. Out of the 27 people how many do I actually see face to face -- maybe three. Probably the original three!
Not that I haven't had a dozen invites to lunch or to meet for a drink. I now weigh just over 12 pounds waiting to be fed and watered. The invites never quite materialize into real food or libations. It seems there is a little flurry of messages back and forth when you first receive a "contact" and then you realize you have absolutely nothing in common and it peters out. But that person is still on your prized friend list adding to your popularity total.
Now if any of my Facebook friends reads this...please don't think I don't love you all dearly. Or at least five or six of you. :-)
As for the rest of you, let's do lunch!
***
Sometimes you've just gotta laugh...
...and these days, the tanned handsome 17-year old sends a bunch of images of himself that turn out to be "borrowed' - in reality he's in his late 30's with two ex-wives, a couple of kids and, if one is really lucky, a dead-end job.
ReplyDeleteThe jobless ones can become sofa-attachments in the blink of an eye, they lie at home drinking beer and running up cable bills while you're out earning a living...
yes, this instant communication world has a lot to answer for!