Friday, February 6, 2009

Shaking Hands with a New Technology

I'm not quite ready to embrace it since I don't know much about it, but my kids helped me set up my own Facebook page. You see, I've been trying to find a friend of mine, Greg Hoffman, for several years now. We'd been in touch, and then, as is typical, I lost his info and couldn't find it anywhere. A few weeks ago, Maggie helped me search Facebook "just in case." Unfortunately, his name was common enough and I didn't know where he was currently living that I couldn't sort through the hundreds of profiles and question every person. So I made my own page today, and within 15 minutes, had found him! A few minutes later, Greg jumped online and then we were on the phone chatting away for a half hour or so.

This was an interesting experience. As Ian told me that I needed to put on a picture, I was faced with my high school fears. What picture would I choose? Did the picture make me look fat? Would people from high school look at it and know who I was, and if they did, would they say, "Wow, she hasn't changed at all!" or would it be, "Wow, she's really let herself go!" And since I'm new at this and wasn't sure what I was doing when I was setting my profile up, I was clicking on CB West fellow classmates left and right, not realizing that I was asking them to accept me as a friend. I expressed concern to Ian "what if they don't want me to be their friend?" and "Did I do anything back then that might make it so they would never want to hear from me again?" I haven't had this sort of anxiety for over 20 years when I was, um, oh yeah, in high school!

1 comment:

Holly said...

Oh, facebook. Be careful or it will suck you in! (At least that's what happened to me.) The main thing I use it for is to stay connected with high school friends and to look at other peoples' pictures. I LOVE looking at pictures! I had the same worries when I started my facebook account--I only wanted to put flattering pictures on. Now that I've seen some of the pictures other people put on, I've realized it doesn't really matter! :) I'll look for you so we can be "facebook friends." :)