It's Not My Kind of Game
Mon., February 2, 02:19 PM
I have been suspicious for years of so-called social networking sites. Early in the process of using e-mail and the internet — maybe fifteen years ago — we didn’t think twice about offering our real names and related information. But, by the time I started to write on D’land, we had learned to be a lot more careful.
I think the last networking site where I used my real name was probably classmates.com, which I found to be pretty useless. It isn’t all their fault, of course; I have yet to find a “clean” database from my high school. As I told some of the people involved, if I had been that slipshod about the databases I worked on over the years, I would have been fired!
Anyway, I was happy with the anonymity advised at D’land. I even opened a separate e-mail just for that purpose, and I had to know people really well before I was ready to tell them more. (I did, incidentally, suffer one incidence of identity theft, but it didn’t come from the computer…) The photos I post, as a rule, are so old that no one is likely to recognize the subjects. That’s the way we have worked for the last seven years — that I know of.
I carefully ignored/avoided invitations to join my$pace or “le livre des visages.” Until last week. I tentatively put my profile in. I invited the M.D. to be my friend, to which she replied, “I will, officially, be damned.” My reason for putting my name — my whole name — out there is that it might be a way of finding old friends who just don’t appear anywhere else. Y’know, the lack of contacts from my own era could be very bad for my self-esteem, if I were that kind of person.
I was looking over one of those sloppy high school databases yesterday and wondering why there were so many non-responders. Some, of course, are deceased. With a little effort, those could be confirmed; try the archives of the local newspaper, for a start. Some, perhaps, are a little embarrassed about how their lives turned out. But I do believe there is a certain group of people who think they are too good to associate with the kids they grew up with. And y’know what? They deserve whatever they get.
I would also like to find some old business contacts, the kind who say, “You’re leaving? What will we do without you? We must keep in touch,” and of course, they never do. I could count on my fingers…
I have found a lot of my kids’ friends, but I am not truly into this. It’s really not my game, this one line update each hour. I would rather just write.
