When I heard about the social network craze, I was in 8th grade and I thought it was stupid. Why in the world would I put myself on the internet and talk to all my friends that I already knew in person? why not talk to them in real life?
I went to a pretty small school system, my graduating class was around 206 people, and I knew most of them, so I really didn't think that I would jump on that bandwagon as quickly as I did. I had a couple of rules though.
-not too much personal information
- Don't friend strangers
- (eventually) no emo statuses, people in general won't care
With the death of myspace, I didn't have to worry about changing my profile song or arbitrarily ranking my friends anymore, that was nice.
Then we come to Facebook and its infamous news feed.
I don't know what all the initial fuss was about, I post everything with the assumption that everyone would be able to see it, even if it wasn't true. It's a social network, privacy almost doesn't belong.
The description of the change of our social dynamic was interesting. We keep in touch with many more people now, and maintain several weak ties with people that we know, literally "networking" across all of our social circles, and when we lose contact with people, they remain our Facebook friends. I have facebook friends that I haven't talked to in over a year. I still think that this doesn't affect the way we see our close ties with close friends. We all, as of now, follow a relatively normal schedule, and with that comes contact with the same people and the closeness of a shared experience. This overtakes anything that our virtual "weak" connections have on us.
I found the ambient knowing bit to be intriguing as well. I've found that I can still keep up with what my close high school friends are doing, and still feel a little bit of connection to them, albeit not very much.
I also find my status updates a useful tool for introspection. Even though most of them are jokes, I find out a lot about myself with how I project myself to others, kind of like looking at an ideal portrait of myself.
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