In defense of social networks
I may have told you some or all of this story before, but I was thinking about it last night so I'm sharing it (again?).
One of the reasons that I still love FB (in spite of its massive faults) and G+ is because it has allowed me to reconnect with some awesome people that I really missed. It has also allowed me to reconnect with some people that I don't actually care much for, but that's not the important part.
Years ago, when I was in college I met indigo_spice in my Acting for Non-Majors class. We bonded over our shared crush on our professor, Jeff Ingman. *swoon* We became friends & starting hanging out pretty regularly. She introduced me to the movie Benny & Joon and we bonded over Johnny Depp. I met her Mom, who is a crazy awesome lady. Good times were had.
One day, indigo_spice introduced me to smoonn. They were in the J school together. We hung out a bit and I always really liked smoon, but our paths didn't cross as often as I would have liked. At some point smoonn & quetzalcoatl_9 moved away. Then indigo_spice moved away, too, in the opposite direction.
Indigo_spice and I kept in touch via email and such, but I always wished that I'd put more effort into being friends with & keeping in touch with smoonn. Then along came FB. I didn't join it at first. I was a hold-out, for sure. I didn't like the sound of this FB thing, because it sounded like a privacy nightmare. Also, in my head it was just the next version of classmates.com and honestly, I still don't really care overly much about reconnecting with people from high school.
Eventually I ended up joining FB because I had to. The political non-profit I was working at used FB for organizing, so I didn't really have a choice. The next thing you know, I'm FB friends with indigo_spice and then eventually smoonn, (and lots of other people too).
Thanks to FB (and later G+), I get to interact with these two awesome ladies pretty darned often, and I'm really glad of that. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I get to have people in my life that I would have otherwise lost touch with (or mostly lost touch with) forever. And that Quetzalcoatl-9 guy is pretty cool, too. And let's not forget Mr. Indigo_Spice, arkham4269, either.
So I'm here to say that FB, for all its faults and issues, has made my life better. Just last night, I got to "hang out" with smoonn & Quetzalcoatl-9 via a G+ hangout. It wasn't quite as good as having them in the room would have been, but it was still pretty awesome. I'm rather hoping we can get Indigo_spice and arkham4269 involved in such a thing one of these days. I should probably get a webcam of my own to help enable this!
As a side note, I've also added a few new friends on G+ recently. I don't mean the big circles that were shared around last week, I mean specifically a couple of friends of friends who have turned out to be really awesome.
Hooray for social networks!
One of the reasons that I still love FB (in spite of its massive faults) and G+ is because it has allowed me to reconnect with some awesome people that I really missed. It has also allowed me to reconnect with some people that I don't actually care much for, but that's not the important part.
Years ago, when I was in college I met indigo_spice in my Acting for Non-Majors class. We bonded over our shared crush on our professor, Jeff Ingman. *swoon* We became friends & starting hanging out pretty regularly. She introduced me to the movie Benny & Joon and we bonded over Johnny Depp. I met her Mom, who is a crazy awesome lady. Good times were had.
One day, indigo_spice introduced me to smoonn. They were in the J school together. We hung out a bit and I always really liked smoon, but our paths didn't cross as often as I would have liked. At some point smoonn & quetzalcoatl_9 moved away. Then indigo_spice moved away, too, in the opposite direction.
Indigo_spice and I kept in touch via email and such, but I always wished that I'd put more effort into being friends with & keeping in touch with smoonn. Then along came FB. I didn't join it at first. I was a hold-out, for sure. I didn't like the sound of this FB thing, because it sounded like a privacy nightmare. Also, in my head it was just the next version of classmates.com and honestly, I still don't really care overly much about reconnecting with people from high school.
Eventually I ended up joining FB because I had to. The political non-profit I was working at used FB for organizing, so I didn't really have a choice. The next thing you know, I'm FB friends with indigo_spice and then eventually smoonn, (and lots of other people too).
Thanks to FB (and later G+), I get to interact with these two awesome ladies pretty darned often, and I'm really glad of that. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I get to have people in my life that I would have otherwise lost touch with (or mostly lost touch with) forever. And that Quetzalcoatl-9 guy is pretty cool, too. And let's not forget Mr. Indigo_Spice, arkham4269, either.
So I'm here to say that FB, for all its faults and issues, has made my life better. Just last night, I got to "hang out" with smoonn & Quetzalcoatl-9 via a G+ hangout. It wasn't quite as good as having them in the room would have been, but it was still pretty awesome. I'm rather hoping we can get Indigo_spice and arkham4269 involved in such a thing one of these days. I should probably get a webcam of my own to help enable this!
As a side note, I've also added a few new friends on G+ recently. I don't mean the big circles that were shared around last week, I mean specifically a couple of friends of friends who have turned out to be really awesome.
Hooray for social networks!