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After just over a year on MySpace, my "Friends" list has now grown to over 500 people. I guess that's a milestone. I'm kinda failing to see the point of the whole 'huge friends list' thing - I mean, it's one thing to collect experiences in life, collect stories, collect acquaintances... but what kind of bragging rights do you get from having a huge list of "MySpace Friends"? Is Tom really your friend?
I dunno - maybe it's all about living la vida linkedin. I'm starting to jade a bit on the whole online frontier thing. I think it's something about how one evening of hanging out one-on-one with a person can cement a friendship better than a few years of regular online chatting, etc. Furthermore, there's only so much time in the day! I'm reasonably active on a few web forums - mostly the absolutely *fantastic* http://livepa.org forums, but occasionally the Ableton forums, the MPC-Forums boards, Electronic Music 411 , the local Black Hole Club forums, Ishkur.com's Community forum, Vancouver's FNK.ca rave forums, Calgary's Subtutious forums, and a few local private forums for friends. Hah, ok, I guess that's actually quite a lot - and, I must confess, I've taken full advantage of the FireFox 'Open In Tabs' bookmark folder tool thingey, so checking all the forums is a single click away. That doesn't do much for my productivity. Still though, there's an interesting juxtaposition between online and offline. Over the years, I've made some solid, deep, longterm friendships via these web forums. On the other hand, there are folks who I've known for years in Real Life™ and consider to be my closest friends - though when I read their posts online, I just don't get that instant feeling of connection, that vibe you get when you meet someone online and something just clicks. How does that work, exactly? Is it entirely chemical, some kind of animal reaction to body language and scent, where we choose to surround ourselves with people who look and feel right to us? Compare with a relationship conducted exclusively online, through text - is that more - or less - pure than a relationship over the phone? Heh. I digress. The use of 'friends' in a MySpace context is just a metaphor, like 'desktop' for a computer interface, and 'wallpaper' for a desktop background image (a term I've never understood - in who's reality is 'wallpaper' something you put on a desk?!). These people aren't friends, but there's no reason they couldn't become friends. MySpace is, like every other social networking software, just an icebreaker party game; a way for people to find one another on an increasingly vast internet - and it should be taken exactly as seriously as one. Stand up, say your name, and three interesting things about yourself! "Hi, my name is Drew. I perform live-pa techno, enjoy playing with rope and knots, and once booted a mainframe by spinning up the hard disk with a power drill." ...that's an entire other story, and one for another day. ;)
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