My Social Networks

Then and Now

“I can­not stress how impor­tant an inde­pen­dent mind in a per­son is to me. I like the dream­ers, the ide­al­ists, and the imprac­ti­cal. I take great joy in explor­ing the depths of someone’s intel­li­gence and imag­i­na­tion. I enjoy watch­ing some­one think, for it is only then that I do not feel so utterly alone.”

Jayel Aheram

I have a pro­file on every major online social net­work (and on little-known ones as well) that exist. My space is on MySpace, my face is on Facebook, and my work his­tory is linked in LinkedIn. I am live on Livejournal, a furry in Fur Affinity, and a tweeter on Twitter. I am a Flickr addict, a Stickam user, and a Digger of arti­cles. In the online medium, I am a social media maven. I am a pub­lic fig­ure by choice. I am always con­nected; always online. At last count, I am a mem­ber of at least eigh­teen dif­fer­ent social net­works. And those are just the ones I actively track.

Offline, of course, my net­work of friends and acquain­tances is far smaller and far more per­sonal. I am able to count in both hands, the num­ber of peo­ple I choose to asso­ciate with in my spare time (not count­ing fam­ily, nat­u­rally). Either I grav­i­tate towards those types of peo­ple or them to me, but more often than not, it is those who are unashamedly dif­fer­ent or fiercely inde­pen­dent or ambi­tious that I find myself being around. I like peo­ple who are them­selves, peo­ple who are not pre­oc­cu­pied with other people’s per­cep­tion of them, peo­ple who not only think, but think for them­selves. I can­not stress how impor­tant an inde­pen­dent mind in a per­son is to me. I like the dream­ers, the ide­al­ists, and the imprac­ti­cal. I take great joy in explor­ing the depths of someone’s intel­li­gence and imag­i­na­tion. I enjoy watch­ing some­one think, for it is only then that I do not feel so utterly alone. Descartes once claimed that “I think, there­fore I am.” I claim that “They think, there­fore they are.”

When I was just a young kid in school, I was blessed (or cursed, depend­ing on your view­point) with a vibrant and out­go­ing per­son­al­ity as well as the fear­less­ness of being the weird kid in school. I was the kid the Catholic school­teach­ers had to ban from the library because I was read­ing too much and ask­ing too many uncom­fort­able ques­tions about reli­gion. I was the kid that needed to be pun­ished for singing songs out­side in the rain dur­ing class. I was the kid in my pub­lic high school that gave to and received hugs from girl friend to the ire of their boyfriends. I was the kid that ran around with a pair of Pikachu ears on his head and screamed, “Pika!” Though, I was not quite pop­u­lar (infa­mous would be a more fit­ting term), I was well-liked by my fel­low students.

I was nei­ther so wise nor so fickle in my choice of com­pany in my younger years. In fact, when I was in high school, I hang out with a quite a large group: my English hon­ors class. From the time I was fresh­man until I left before my senior year, the peo­ple that made up my English hon­ors class remain rel­a­tively unchanged. And oh, what a group it was! Mostly females (I was one of six boys in a class of thirty), we rep­re­sented most of the school’s civic life. We made up the lead­er­ship of all the major clubs on cam­pus, from stu­dent gov­ern­ment, to home­com­ing coun­cil, to the vol­un­teer orga­ni­za­tion, and even the Japanese club. I like most of them for their ambi­tions, some­times for their smarts, but mostly because they were for the most part inde­pen­dent thinkers. I remem­ber a teacher say­ing one time to us, “You are the loud­est class I have and I some­times won­der why. But then I fig­ured it out: you all have some­thing to say.” But, being high school, there are occa­sions when some exhib­ited herd men­tal­ity. And I resented it deeply.

The rules of eti­quette that were fol­lowed were as con­trived as it was silly.

Herd men­tal­ity was even worse in the online net­works I logged on to after school day after day. Excite’s Virtual Places was the online ver­sion of my high school with none of the learn­ing and all of the drama and more. It even had a social hier­ar­chy that mir­rors that of high school (though, being a net­work on the rel­a­tively new World Wide Web, it was in favor of the com­puter geeks, where the hack­ers are the rock stars). There were the speed-fighters who often wore Dragon Ball Z avatars. Like their high school jock coun­ter­parts, they moved in groups, hyper-masculine, and just as dumb. There were the role-players whose only role­play­ing set­ting seemed to be the tav­ern. I, myself, hang out with the anime afi­ciona­dos. The rules of eti­quette that were fol­lowed were as con­trived as it was silly. For one thing, the qual­ity of your avatar and what anime you wore deter­mined your sta­tus within this group. (a side note: I learned much about graph­ics design and com­po­si­tion from crop­ping anime pic­tures for avatars). It was con­sid­ered faux-pas to wear the same avatar as another per­son. It was con­sid­ered a crime to steal a per­son­ally tagged one.

Despite the inanity of Virtual Places, I was able to cre­ate strong rela­tion­ships with peo­ple that last to this day long after Virtual Places shut down. I met my best friend Devin there as well as oth­ers I am still in con­tact with. Nothing has replaced Virtual Places in my life (though, Flickr + Photophlow make very good can­di­dates) with its soap-opera drama and cry-fests. We were young then, just com­ing of age, and barely reach­ing adult­hood. We were com­ing to terms on who we are, striv­ing to forge an iden­tity that is gen­uine to whom really we were. We are now older, hope­fully wiser, and still mes­sage each other on Facebook.