My love-hate relationship with the World Wide Web began when I was in the fifth grade and Geocities was in vogue. Back then, it was hip to have your own personal site, and ICQ was the instant messenger of choice. I remember going online, trying to study HTML on my own because it was cool, and chatting with virtual strangers halfway across the world. There is a thrill I can’t describe to it. Maybe it was in the feeling of making a connection.
I wrote a letter to an old friend today, who described to me the wistful experience of revisiting old SMS messages and clearing them. It struck me how I can’t seem to compartmentalize enough to be able to hang on to everything; each time I clear my inbox, I fear I’m forgetting something.
Every now and then, I go through my inbox and delete old ones to make room for new messages, and I’m down to goodbye messages just from last year. I used to have them all the way up from the first time I left home, now, I’m left with Christmas 2007 messages. Haha.
A sobering thought–do we have to forget old memories to make room for new ones? Do we lose touch with old friends when we come across new ones? I shudder to think so, but I’m afraid I might be guilty of that. I go on Facebook, I look at pictures on people’s Multiply sites, I read people’s LJs, so I always feel like I know what’s going on; when in truth, I really don’t. It is an artificial sense of keeping in touch; what is sacrificed, I still don’t fully know. I may know what you felt yesterday, according to your Facebook status, but do I really know how you feel? How jarring it is to feel like I’m a stranger to the people I remember being friends with at home, when in truth I’ve seen pictures and read their thoughts all the way up to yesterday.
Truth: how jarring it is to feel so distanced from people, but to know so many aspects of their lives. How strange it is to be able to “Facebook friend” someone you met at a happy hour yesterday, and go through his or her pictures of last year’s Halloween shenanigans after only having met the person really for thirty minutes.
Social media. On most days, I love it, but there are some days it just gets to me.
Filed under: social media , social media
