Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life |
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Saturday, September 17, 2011 Sometimes I click on the "Find Friends" link and scan through the names. Not because I'm looking for more friends but because I find it interesting to see who FB thinks I might know. For a lot of the suggestions, the connection is obvious -- they might be friends with a lot of my writer friends (suggesting they too are a writer/blogger) or they might be friends with a bunch of parents from the kids' school (suggesting a fellow parent I haven't met yet.) A few, however, show no friends in common which is interesting too. I imagine we must have some shared attribute other than friends -- perhaps we both like Firefly or are interested in colonial coppers. (I'll have to look into that.) What I find most intriguing, however, is the occasional suggestion with whom I share several friends but whose common friends are not related. We might share a connection with a parent, a writer, and an activist, none of whom know each other. Or perhaps a music person, a neighbor, and a relative. Clearly, Facebook thinks that if all these disparate people know both of us, we likely know each other -- a fair assumption. But why do we have these divergent paths connecting us? Why one writer and not the others? What about the guy who is friends with a parent and a music friend? Is it because of their jobs? Does the fact that one is a lesbian and the other very liberal have anything to do with it? Are they perhaps all neighbors and I just didn't realize it? Could they all be related? These oddball connections are mind-boggling to me. It fascinates me that people, myself included, inhabit multiple worlds and sometimes those worlds overlap. Each of us is not simply a parent or a writer or a Land Rover owner or any other single category, but a multifaceted conglomeration of many interests, professions, and other aspects, some of which we may not even think about most of the time. It also goes to show what a very, very small world this really is. |
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