My Dad and Social Networking
This is a techy blog, not a personal one, but just what I have been thinking as I consume all the tech around me.
My Dad, Lynn Pearson, died in 1999. Oddly, however, I find many of the times (which seems to be a lot lately) I spend on social networking sites reminds me of him. He would never have used Facebook, and definitely not Twitter; it took 3 years for me to get him on the Internet to start with…so I tried to think about why when I am on Facebook do I think about him.
The answer to me, is that Facebook, and to some extent Twitter and the rest of the networks I am on (see previous post about social overload), shows a curious cross-section of your life to this point. I have friends on my Facebook from all stages of my life: including friends from elementary school that I haven’t talked to in years, high school, college, old jobs etc. Most of them don’t know each other and don’t have anything in common except me. In some ways it really does feel like Six Degrees of Separation.
So the random quizzes and conversations that come up with this varied group, leads me to think about those different places in my life. I definitely hadn’t thought about Wesley and his “Why yes” taunting in years, or for that matter his Mustang he had in high school that he put on “5 Cars I’ve Owned,” or all the kids I knew at St. John’s Elementary School. Maybe I am getting old, but I think it is awesome that new technology is allowing me to reminsence and interact with those people, and do it before I am 80.
In the end, maybe this blog isn’t about my technology or my dad, but rather the curious socialogical experiment that we are undertaking. The one in which an increasingly dispered populace with seeming less interconnectedness, is actually overcoming that distance virtually. Another reason an amazing time to be alive!