One guest said
"She'd much rather phone than e-mail" but she's as guilty as the rest
of us for forwarding the electronic chain letters. Maybe it's a way to connect
but probably just a way to pass the time at work - seeing who might respond.
I hadn't seen another
since her 40th birthday when we left with hugs and promises for brunching the
next month - well, twelve months and many facebook posts later, we finally meet
again- for real.
We don't need to
catch up - everything of importance has been posted on facebook, right? In my
first year of university, I took a Sociology course (it seemed the thing to do)
where we learned about the existence of this false familiarity where we're on a
first name basis with everyone like they're our schoolyard chums, and yet we
don't know their last names! I couldn't help but feel that's what was happening
here but on a more perverse level. I hadn't seen some of my guests for over a
year but I knew exactly what was going with them in our unintentional
voyeuristic relationship.
One Harvard professoris
quoted “One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste
determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste. Do birds of a
feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?” What happens
when social media enters the picture? 694 friends? Really?
It’s been said that
students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who
used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what
sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you
meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Sometimes it is easy to trick
us, isn’t it?
Another Teacup Project attendee received the
annual Christmas family newsletter where the news about the children was
replaced with the statement that "their
updates were posted on Facebook so everyone knew what the girls had been up to";
Except this attendee wasn't on Facebook so had no idea "what the girls had
been up to". Booooo.
Thumbs down to
electronic dinner tables and twitter updates #love you. Two thumbs up to
meeting your girlfriends for lunch or going to the pub. Whatever ! Good luck
and let me know how it goes!
