Face to Face with Facebook

I've taken the plunge. I am now a very public user of Facebook and gathering Friends as fast as my little electronic paws can gather them. I am socially networking.

I've been watching uneasily from the sidelines for months while my face-to-face, seen often, "real" friends have been joining up. I've listened to their tales about finding old high school buddies and keeping tabs on nearly every action and reaction of current buddies. They referred me to Facebook to view any new family photos and then told me to figuratively cool my heels when I was reminded, "Oh, that's right, you're not on Facebook."

My final push came after I listened to the Word Nerds guys talk about Facebook. (Word Nerds is a great podcast if you have any interest at all in the linguistic world around you -- what we're saying and how we say it. The guys are smart and funny and find amazing music to include in their broadcasts.) They compared the "Wall" - the place your Facebook Friends can post comments for all to see - with the ancient Greek concept of the public square. They talked about how the short comments hearken back to the early days of the telegraph -- short, immediate, "blurps" of information. ("Blurp" is my word, not theirs.)

Now that I'm in the mix, have found a few old pals, and peeked into the daily electronic lives of friends and family from all over the map, I've come up with some of my own questions and conclusions. When you re-connect with people who knew you years ago, does that make you more like you used to be? If you find that pal from eighth grade -- back from when you were both probably more eager and funny and innocent and optimistic than you are now -- can those buried qualities bubble up in you again? Is it possible that we can be reminded of some of what was best about us, re-capture it, and make it part of who we are now? Can we grow our best qualities rather than replace them?

I think about the song Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Do we have a better chance of keeping our personal circle of life "unbroken" by connecting our past more firmly to our present? Is it overstatement and just plain goofy to think that something like Facebook can bring about fundamental change in us? I don't know. But I'm thinking about it.