Samhain Christmas Moon
Social media. A possible explanation for its rapid rise and spread around the world. Thinking yesterday about Facebook, the app I know best, I realized that it had reconnected me with an outer tier of friends and acquaintances: former high school and college classmates, hometown folk, friends from various organizations with which I’ve worked over the years, random friends from other moments in life. People with whom I would have likely lost contact.
These are people who were at one time significant in my daily life and me in theirs. In the old regime of dial telephones, snail mail and the occasional reunion they would have faded away, not because they were unimportant, but rather because communicating them would have been difficult at best, impossible in most cases. Now I can hear daily from members of the Alexandria class of 1965, the Northstar chapter of the Sierra Club, fellow radicals from college.
This has the effect of expanding my social world, of allowing memory and today to coexist. I feel enriched by the experience.
It’s not such a good medium for close friends and family. We communicate by phone, by visits, by texts and e-mails, more dialogical than a scatter shot post can be.
What I’m saying is that Facebook, in our mobile culture, in this large nation and globe of ours, bridges the distance and makes friendships of the past available still. I suppose in this sense it serves a similar purpose to the small town or urban area where similar folks might have dispersed, but still be close enough for occasional visits. Now that small town can be 12,000 miles across.
I’ve been surprised at how much this means to me. And, gladdened.