i have a facebook profile, i updated my livejournal pretty steadily throughout college, i recently joined twitter, and now i jumped ship to create my own blog. some common complaints i hear about these sites are that they are narcissistic and egotistical. people tell me it is narcissistic to write 140 characters about what i had for dinner, or egotistical to think that my opinion is so important that it deserves a blog entry about it. but i am not forcing others to read what i say, and i have opinions about everything whether i write it down or not.
but the biggest criticism of social networking is people who think it can be replaced by a simple telephone call. i have two words for these people: ashley davis. ashley and i met in college and saw each other every single day for two straight years. we were constant in each other's lives. as happens with college friends, though, we went in different directions. while i finished by four years in boston and stayed here after graduation, ashley catapulted a third (and final) year abroad into a life that has take her from england, to new york, to arkansas, and now to sweeden.
through these travels, ashely and i have talked on the phone and visited in person many times, but it is just impossible for the two of us to talk every day, as we did in college. it is for this reason that i love when ashley tweets about her kickball team winning or posts a picture of her grad school classmates. these are things that i would miss out on if we were not on facebook or twitter. i can read her blog about life in sweeden (who knew milk was so complicated?) and get those little tastes of ashley that i loved having in my life.
sure, not everyone that i am friends with on facebook is like ashely. there are many people who i took one class with or met at one party, but i would take 100 of those people, whose updates i can just skim past and do not even register on my radar, for one ashley davis.
