the facebook phenomenon revisited

Last year I blogged about my first experience with Facebook. At the time, I declared it to be an impersonal way of getting personal with friends. I also suggested that it made me feel like a socially-challenged hermit as it validated my dearth of friends (at present, I’m at 38 versus another friend who has 400, although at the time of the original posting, I only had 19 friends)! And as previously mentioned, one of my more active friends, is the seventeen year-old who mows my lawn (Hey again, Taylor!).

Since that time, I’ve become a little more accustomed to the social network and on Friday, for the first time ever, I had a chat session on Facebook with one of my Facebook friends. Interestingly, my friend, Sarah, and I have never met. We began our on-line friendship when Sarah’s mother, Susan, a good friend of mine, provided the “connection.” My friend knew Sarah and I shared a number of interests and since that time, Sarah and I have communicated exclusively via the internet. We share an odd combination of interests ranging from our support of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), our love of all things sci-fi (particular Star Trek), and our mutual respect and awe for the wonderful recipes originating from the Cooks Illustrated folks.

It surprises me how friendships can form without ever actually meeting a person face-to-face (For a cautionary tale of the downside of establishing a friendship via Facebook, I suggest you see the documentary “Catfish”). Our conversation flowed as easily as it would have if we had met via conventional means. So thank you, Susan, for the introduction, thank you, Sarah, for the friendship and thank you, (albeit a still wary one from a novice user), Mark Zuckerberg, for establishing Facebook, a cultural phenomenon of our times.