WHAT’S YOUR FACE?

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, THE FRIDAY LIFESTYLE SPECIAL OF MANILA BULLETIN, FRIDAY, 18 JANUARY 2008)

Facebook killed our yahoogroups, which, in its time, also killed even more traditional ways of staying in touch, such as telephone calls, letters, and greeting cards. The Christmas before last, many holiday wishes were sent to my Yahoo! inbox from friends from all over the world and many of them felt somewhat like a handwritten letter, if only because handwritten letters have long gone the way of the dodo and there was nothing you could do about it.

BLURB
Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. —Mark Zuckerberg

What originally started as a college dorm service, founded by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, is now, according to the New York Times, the largest and the fastest growing social networking website with at least 60 million users all over the world. Sure, it’s got a lot of problems and its privacy clauses have yet to be rewritten, but my collection of friends alone is growing every day and I believe it is the same for every other FB addict, which I hope I have not become.
Facebook is, indeed, quite fun, if only because it is a convenient way to keep track of your friends, family, and acquaintances. Its birthday alert and events alert are most useful to me, but that is assuming I will stay interested in the network to log in at least once a day.
Also, it has over 10,000 applications, including games such as Scrabble, so there is so much to do when you are in there. One of my favorites is iLike, which allows me to access a song, along with its video, as old as Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and dedicate it to friends in my network who might have similar feelings about the song or the video.
There’s also TripAdvisor, which is quite fun, at least in the beginning when you are setting it up, trying to recall all the cities you have ever been in the world. Right now, it simply keeps a record of how much of the world I’ve covered and how much more I should plan on seeing in the future.
Drinking sessions on Facebook are not as fun as the midnight-to-morning sessions I used to do with friends back in high school and college, but at least I can enjoy anything between a regular black Russian and a whimsical “reindeer blush” with friends I do not see often without having to worry about where, when, how to meet and who’s driving should we all get too drunk to drive. What’s more, I can “rent a limo with” or “throw Hillary (Clinton) at” or even “cast a spell on” them on Superpoke.
I don’t know what this is saying about the future, but at the moment it is quite a relief that I don’t have to work too hard to stay in touch with some of the people in my network. I don’t have to make time to write them a carefully worded letter or a casual note. I don’t have to huff and puff my way across town, through hell and traffic, to meet them somewhere for a drink or for coffee or for conversation. Sometimes, all it takes is to pick a drink and “select all” when sending a round to any number of friends, from 5 to 5,000 or more, depending on how many friends you have or how selective you are in confirming “friend requests” or how bold you are in adding up people who might not even remember you.
If this is the future of friendship, how sad! But I can’t be too happy that practically all my Facebook friends are people I see every now and then and spend time with over real brunch, lunch, cocktails, dinner, or after-dinner. A good number of them have been there for me, all along, Facebook or not, and I have been there for them, too. Maybe a handful of them won’t be there when my life turns upside down, but with all of them, save for maybe one or two or—OK—three, I have had at the very, very least a conversation deep enough or fun enough or memorable enough to have developed into some level of friendship, if only we had the time and more opportunities to work on it.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com