that stands for “What Would Jesus Post For His Status Message?”
Facebook is among other things really frickin tedious. At any given moment, you are inundated with seemingly endless “fan suggestions” and “pokes” and inane statuses that answer one of the following questions: what are you eating? what are getting ready to do? where are you taking your kids? where did you take your kids? what shampoo do you use? will you buy this shampoo again?
Let’s face it. we feel connected in some bizarre way because of this information. We give each other thumbs up and we click on a link that indicates we “like” it.
I’m as guilty of being self-absorbed as the next person. Well, if the next person doesn’t happen to be Lindsay Lohan. I feel the need to share really lame things about my life and what’s going – ie, this here bloggity blog blog – and I fall into hysterics when i feel no one is paying attention to me. I will fully admit this.
But then it strikes me that we are all clawing for attention, to feel important, needed, respected, considered, even laughed at and/or with. We want to matter.
How does one “matter” anyway? What does it take to be a blip on the radar of the world? How high do you have to climb? How far do you have to jump? There are those of us who may have an overblown sense of importance, that if something were to happen to us the world would implode. Well, at least our immediate world, if not the Whole Wide World (of sports).
At the end of the day, everything matters – our entire lives and the things we choose to do with our time. Connections, virtual and physical alike, are important and make up our very souls. We are together in this life, and just a simple click of a button can make your entire being light up and rejoice. I am always all for all the things that bring us together and makes us smile. All I ask is that you make it count.
I remember my first email account back in the day when everything was text-based and you had to know the code number to Reply or Delete or Forward and there was no such thing as a mouse-click. And soon after email was available for the masses there came the viral messges.
Now I have to explain to those in the house who don’t understand, “viral” is not to be confused with “virUS.” I know they are from the same root word, but don’t go all etymologist on me. When it comes to all things internet, a virAL message is one that get transferred faster than the spped of sound to anyone and everyone with a modem. Before you know it, a link gets a billion some hits/visits from you, your mom, uncle bobby jo and aunt george.
What fascinates me about this is the insight into human behavior that one can derive. I used to go to MSN to see what was on the front page – the “water cooler” talk fodder of the day. How does everyone know about this stuff roughly at the same time? Back when the Sopranos was on, everyone in the whole country seemed to be talking on Monday morning about Tony and Carmela and such. Collectively, it feels like we are all plugged into the same things.
Some would blame the internet, before that TV, and before that newspapers. I love the history of the local paper, the Gazette, which you can find out more about at Colonial Williamsburg. Back in the day, the colonial paper’s motto was “Containing the freshest Advices, Foreign and Domestick.” I’m not really sure what kind of stick a domestick was…
I had taken to reading old Gazettes which you can find at http://research.history.org/ in the Digital Library. Some of it is absolutely fascinating while other parts are fairly ho hum. You can read about Thomas Jefferson’s arrival at Congress and how he found a dark bay horse which was “roach’d and bobb’d about 6 or 7 months ago.” You can also find entries like poor William Clark, a runaway, who “winks with his left eye” and apparently lost a bit of his hat …
Now with things like Facebook (which I swear is a conspiracy developed by CIA or NASA or maybe PETA) and Google Reader, we are all literally on the same page. When you are subscribed to multiple blogs you can’t help but notice the trends in topics and references. I mean collectively we tap into the same resources and have the same discussions over and over again. Maybe we should be afraid of robots after all – the collective is coming. Resistance is futile. Or maybe I’m just kinda intrigued by the notion that there is, after all, a body of knowledge we share – state regulated tests or not. I guess I only wish it were a touch more diverse.
here’s a little story I’ve got to tell
about ummm some people on the uhhhh internet.
ok so that didn’t rhyme. Sorry.
So let’s go back a bit in history shall we? Once upon a time someone decided that if you could connect a whole bunch of personal computers together so that they could share information and “talk” to each other, this would be like a rad idea. So somewhere along the way the internet was born. I remember the days at college when I got my first email account which mainly consisted of a really annoying text font in like this wacky orange color. The commands to do this and that were like mumbo jumbo to me and might as well have been in ancient aramaic.
Fast forward what seemed like a millisecond and suddenly we’re all on Facebook talking to people we haven’t seen in like a million years. It’s crazy.
Where I’m going with this is social networking online. You see, sometime after the birth of email and roughly before CAPTCHA, there was this idea that people wanted to meet other people online. This took various forms like internet dating through classifieds, profile databases, craigslist ads, hotfriendfinder dot com (please dont go there) and my favorite (and by favorite I mean not) match dot com (match dot combat as some call it).
And so was born the idea that this medium could be used as yet another place to find rejection … er I mean true love or at least a date. But more than that, it clicked in the minds of people like “Tom” of Myspace, and the kids at Facebook and the “Mikey Heard” of Meetin, that not only could you find the one soulmate and devoted significant other of your life, you could also just find some other bored chumps who wanted to go see a movie or play freeze tag. (Not online freeze tag. That game sucks. It took awhile to figure out if I was frozen or if my computer just crashed.)
So Meetin… the unofficial history according to me.
When I first moved to Denver in 2001, about amonth after 9-11, I realized quickly that I had friends apart from my brother and his girlfriend (now wife) and their friends. Lovely people all, but I found that I really needed to get out and explore a bit (meaning mostly I wanted to get trashed in a new bar every other weekend) and so I soon stumbled onto Yahoo! Groups. (I just now had to go and see if they still have such a thing, and yes they do.)
The idea of Meetin was to provide a way for a bunch of strangers to get together and become friends. In some ways it made perfect sense. When you become an adult somehow you lose this ability you had as a kid to just go up to another kid and say, hey you wanna play, I don’t know, freeze tag? Like it doesnt matter if you even know the kid’s name. You’re on the playground, there’s a kid, wala. Presto chango, you’re friends.
As adults, not so much. But why not? What are we afraid of? So the premise of the group was sound and the format was appealing to people like me who were and are a tad chaotic. You would post a message to everyone saying, hey, I wanna go do XYZ! Anyone else? And then you’d message back and forth and agree on a date and time and place and wala! Presto chango, you’re friends.
Now when you get any group of people together in any kind of activity, you will always find that things fall apart. (Hey that makes a good book title.) Unless, and this is the point I will eventually get around to making here, you have some kind of structure. If you group a bunch of people together, and sit back to watch, you will discover soon enough who are the leaders, who are the followers, who are the talkers, and who are the doers. It just naturally happens because it’s human nature to function in such a way. We saw it in Lord of the Flies and on Eight is Enough. Everybody has their place, even if it’s just comic relief.
When Meetin started to grow exponentially gigantic, I took a huge step back. I have always hated exponents. I like watching from a distance, and I saw how my best friend, (who I met through Meetin so I can’t be too harsh on it) the city leader at the time, struggled with all the ins and outs of overseeing such a group. All the drama (pronounced drA-ma) with event planners and who planned what event and who stole my idea and why are there 2 thousand happy hours on the same night and how come I got stuck with the tab?
And not to even mention the dating. Oh the dating. The difference between Meetin and actual dating websites is that you get built-in wingpeople. Of course I’m not there to meet anyone to date. I’m there to make friends. You seem friendly. Let’s do an event. You know, a private event.
(For those of you still reading this, you are probably members of the group and are rolling your eyes at me. You know who I’m talking about!!!! :p)
Thing is, I have made some amazing friends. The best of my life. My very closest friends ever have all come out of Meetin, so I fully endorse it and feel blessed to have had it in my life. Plus I have “friends” from all over the country and if I find myself going to place X, I will most likely be able to wrangle up some people to meet for lunch or dinner or drinks or movies or art or any countless activities. That’s the beauty of the internet and the fact that behind every post, more or less, there is a person behind it. Except those stupid spambots – whoever writes those things should die a thousand deaths. I mean that in the nicest way possible.
And there’s Facebook which is all the rage and I believe a secret plot by some evil corporation to keep tabs on all of us. I get to run across people I never would have otherwise and probably may never have actually even thought about ever again (no offense to anyone, but let’s be real ok) and now I get to know exactly what they are doing or thinking or eating for lunch. It’s neat.
