"Friends"
So, I’m a member of a couple of these new-fangled “socialized media” sites, or whatever the kids are calling them. And, in each one, I have a spare handful of “friends” or “followers” or “sycophants” or whatever this particular ad-delivery system chooses to call them. And I look around and notice that most people tend to have like, hundreds.
Of course in one sense I know full well that not all of these people are “friends” in any sane definition of the word. On the other hand, it is a truism that the number of people I interact with in the Real, Physical World is vanishingly small. Outside of family and work, it’s probably like… one? There are a couple more if you add people from the local library where I work on the Board. But the fact remains that even if I wanted to inflate my online ego, I would basically have to start picking names out of a phone book to get up to 100 people that I’m even acquainted with.
And so, possessing as I do the unique combination of deep introspection and great self-loathing, it occurs to me that this is pretty fucked up. I mean, aren’t we some kind of ape which has specially evolved to be social? What of my monkeysphere? Why can’t I have a vast collection of people I can pretend to be good buddies with?
I guess this is why years and years ago, I got excited over a mailing list I used to run. It got a couple hundred subscribers and generated a lot of interesting commentary. It took a while to sink in that even this relatively small number of people cared what I had to say, but after a while it was intoxicating. I guess this is the truth of fame, no matter how small.
On a day-to-day basis, it’s possible to just move through life and not care too much about the small nature of my social network. But when it’s pinned to the corkboard of social networking, wriggling pathetically, it makes one want to come up with elaborate metaphors of desperation.
