On The Randomness of Facebook

This past week, I have become a frequent visitor to Facebook, one of those popular networking websites that appeals mostly to teens and young adults through college age, with the occasional older person as well. The experience has been a useful one for me, because it has given me a much better perspective about a few matters I have long pondered. Since this is a blog given to much pondering, I will continue. Some of these lessons were ones I should have known, but lacked the perspective to put into a full focus.

On Moderate Popularity

I have never considered myself a particularly well-liked or popular person, despite being well traveled and generally talkitive and outgoing. Perhaps I am a bit biased by an early life in which it appeared as though I was a social leper, but I have never considered how dramatically my social life has improved in the last few years until I took a look at the amount of people on facebook who were willing to say they were my friends. Now, many of my closest friends do not even have facebook, even among young adults and teenagers, but over a hundred people so far have been willing to say they were my friends. This is a remarkable thing. To put it into some context, one of my roommates was much more popular around campus it seemed, and he certainly went to more parties and had more dates than I did. However, looking at his profile indicated that he had 78 friends, but nearly all of them in Southern California. Of his 78 friends, 59 of them lived in the Los Angeles area. Of my 118 friends in comparison, only 11 of them lived in my most popular region, Tampa Bay.

My Friendships Are Scattered

This leads to the next conclusion, one that had prevented me from taking a full account of my rise in popularity from leper to a moderately well-liked one. My friendships are scattered all over the US, and indeed, all over the world. I do not have any particularly large groups of friends in any one place. I have sizeable groups of friends in Florida, Texas, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Washington, and a few other places, but they are not concentrated at all, and include a couple of friends in England and one in South Africa. Part of the reason for this scattering of friends is being in the Church of God, which tends to bring one into contact with a wide variety of people. But comparisons with other young people in the church of God on my buddy list (and there are many such people to compare with) demonstrates that while I share a great deal of common friends among people in the Church of God, most of them show a greater concentration in the area where they live. Even among my many friends who are not in the church, many of them, like me, have scattered far and wide in the course of interesting and complicated travels, and so my friends seem to be a bit more nomadic than most. My own moving around, my ties in a variety of different areas, and my lack of a strong social base among peers in my home territory (where I have lived the vast majority of life) have given me a false, and somewhat darker, picture of my social network than was in fact the truth. The truth is, I could travel in many areas and have friends and acquaintances there, at least a couple of people I knew and enjoyed spending time with. However, I don't have any one particular area whose pull of connections is so strong as to make that a place where I truly belong. In the end, though, my dispersed friendships can be a great source of strength provided I can summon the energy to keep up with them, which is the purpose of a site like Facebook in the first place.

On Memories

Joining Facebook has also been the opportunity to revisit a lot of memories of people I knew when I was younger. People who were not particularly nice to me in high school, for example, now inhabit a fair deal of space on my Facebook page, and I remember many stories about those whom I have added. However, the past is put into a different perspective when one reflects on where I stand and where they stand now. Many of us are graduate students, who have moved at least once from where we spent those years together. We are older, and hopefully wiser, and in my case at least, nowhere near as squirrelly and immature as we were back then. Remembering the past, even an unpleasant past, need not be depressing, so long as one knows how far one has come. On the other hand, some people have changed dramatically for the worse in their own moral lives, having fallen victim in college to serious immorality, even as others have become very mature and serious young adults. There are certainly cautionary tales that could be told as well as stories of coming to terms with what has been done but burying the hatchet, so to speak. Perhaps that is another purpose of Facebook I was not aware of. The act of putting one's life on a webpage in pictures and songs and stories puts one's life in a different perspective, viewing how we are interconnected, and how we have grown into the people we are today. If people are honest about themselves, it can lead to deeper connections with people as we find out some of what makes them tick and what is most important to them. I know it has been an eye opening experience for me personally.