Re: Time - "You Are Not My Friend" Essay

I have been house/cat sitting for a friend of mine and along with the fact that I love her cats, I get the added bonus of getting to look at her Time Magazine when it comes in (I don't usually read enough of it every week to make it worth subscribing to). Today, the October 15^th, 2007 issue came and on the back page (pg 82) there is an Essay by Joel Stein entitled "You Are Not My Friend" which got me thinking about a few things.

As you know, I recently finished getting Spiritgeek.com up and running. One of the first things I did was send out a notice on MySpace using their "Post a Bulletin" to all my "friends" asking them to take a look at the site and give me their comments and suggestions.

Well, either my "friends" are not friends or no-one actually reads the bulletins, I'm guess the latter since everyone I talk to directly did not remember getting the post, including the great goddess of my received bulletins since she sometimes sends 2 or 3 a day.

So, back to Time magazine. The essay goes into how all these online "social" networks after a while can take up an awful lot of time and energy trying to keep up on. What really caught my interest was the following:

But really, these sites aren't about connecting and reconnecting. They're a platform for self-branding. Old people are always worrying that r blogging and personal websites and MySpace profiles are taking away our privacy, but they clearly don't understand the word privacy. We're not sharing things we don't want other people to know. We're showing you our best posed, retouched photos. We're listing the Pynchon books we want you to think we've read all the way through. We're allowing other people to write whatever they want us on our walls, unless we don't like it, in which case we just erase it. If we had that much privacy in real life, the bathrooms at that Minnesota airport would be empty.

Joel Stein

It makes me wonder if I have been going about MySpace and such the wrong way,. I don't expect these people that I meet to invite me to Sunday brunch the next time I am in town, but unless "friends" are strictly about the numbers then is there a real point?

I cannot speak for anyone else, but the start of the final paragraph is more about how I choose my "friends":

Until we can build some kind of social network where we can present our true, flawed selves--perhaps some genius can invent something that takes place in a house over dinner with wine--I say we strip down our online communities to just the important parts.

Joel Stein

I get tons of requests for my "friendship" from girls who want me to look at their sexy photos which tells me they haven't actually looked at my profile, it plainly states that I am gay, so I refuse them and on many occasions mark them as "spam."

If you want to be my friend, it's actually really simple, have something, anything of value to say or do. Write something of interest, have a thought or two bouncing around in that skull of yours or write and sing a new song with your band, just be something other than cyber-waste.

Any takers? You show me your flaws and I'll show you mine...