Anonymizing Life
I’m pretty sure that anonymizing is not a real word. That’s why I used it… don’t try to stop me!
I’m some-what concerned for my child… he’s going to grow up in a world where friendship is indicated not by time spent with a person, but by clicking a button on one of several websites.
Increasingly, people can gain entrance to our lives without having to meet us. Just find us on facebook, click “add as friend” and if we agree, whatever we’ve put on the internet about our lives becomes available for them.
While there might be some tacit advantage as far as transparency goes, it’s really a false transparency — only what we want online (or can’t keep our friends from putting online) goes online.
All this to say, I think there’s some danger to the level of interaction we can establish with people without having met them. Your friends are not necessarily the people who post comments on that totally hilarious youtube video you put up on facebook… your friends are the people who invest time in your life… for real. That might be reflected on facebook, but more often it is probably not.
Good post. I’m trying to decide whether the investment in Facebook time can be justified.