This morning, my brother mentioned a name I haven't heard in many years: Steve Rivers. I know I know somebody named Steve Rivers and I have strange emotions associated with him. I can't say exactly, but they weren't positive. Oh well, I'll just say. I remember the guy as a big crybaby. I don't remember why, but that's what I recall. Of course I'm conflicted about it, he might have been just a nice guy I might have punked with my rather acid wit and snobby attitude. I can't remember enough detail to know why I feel that way about Steve Rivers.
So I took the odd chance that I could find him on Facebook. Yeah right.
I spend a lot of time on Facebook (or FB, as we call it) these days, getting in touch with everybody from everywhere. I've gathered something over 300 friends and associates which is twice Dunbar's Number.
I want to keep gathering everyone, because my book says you can never be too well known. You never actually have to deal with more than a couple score folks at once and they take up 168 hours a week. So even as I figure out ways to define circles of friendship in FB's context, I don't mind appearing to be one of those sociopathic individuals with more than 1000 'friends'.
On the one hand, I am immediately drawn to the idea of concentric circles. Intimates, then close friends, then ordinary friends and associates. Then business colleagues, peers and clients, online commenters, fellow politicos and friends of those friends. But then I decide I don't like the hierarchy much, because there are always breaks. On the other hand, why not supersets and subsets and overlapping circles of friends? Hard to say really, all I really want is to keep track of how those I might forget came to know me. If there are 500, many of whom I share some experience in the distant past, how would I know what to do or say if I actually met them? I might say, Saint John's Church 1975-78 and hope they recall. But then for them it might not have been a favorable time. Such dilemmas trouble me, and I don't have a Miss Manners answer for someone who finds virtue in some lack of pretense - which is to say that I enjoy my class role though its privileges are relatively few. It's hard for me to know exactly why I should presume to have some answer acceptable to society, except that I might have 500 friends. That must mean something worthy of a thoughtful answer.
They say that FB has 175 million members, and that it turns nary a profit. How on Earth can one keep that many servers and networks and programmers all going? In a world with so many different kinds of Steve Riverses, somebody ought to figure out something. I might even pay for it. After all, at my age, with seven thousand someodd names in my electronic black book, there ought to be some better way to meet and remember them electronically. It seems people have only bothered to do so for the purposes of dating. There's profit in being the Yenta just as there is in being the Pimp, and unfortunately for our society the trend seems to be angling towards the latter having more business. So I'm thinking there's got to be a better use for profiling software than all this sort of solicitation. There's a project.
There's one thing I have thought about. That would be a kind of wristwatch worn on the right hand perhaps. When you shake someone's hand, that triggers enough of an intimate association to give some trace of a profile. At the Peace during church I give a two-handed shake. It means more. For some, I embrace which means even more. If I work a crowd, I'd want something more of me left behind and more given, and I sure as hell wouldn't want something like Facebook mediating it for me. That's *my* information. But FB is good for getting into groups and gangs of associates from all of ones walks of life. It's a big lobby and I think it's a great start. But there's a lot more that can and should be done.
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