Face to Face (Sort Of)

Well, I should have known it was bound to happen eventually:

I have been sucked into that giant vacuum cleaner of time known as facebook. And somehow, I am living to tell the tale.

My foray into facebook did not begin with some great quest to keep track of good friends, or get hold of people I had, for various reasons, lost touch with or let drop out of mylife. It began, strangely enough, with an effort to learn more about a graduate program in New York I am trying to learn more about.

After contacting the admissions office representative in charge of Long Island University's dual degree program with NYU, I was encouraged to look up a group of current program students active on facebook. And so I joined.

Little did I know, however, that in short order, nearly every single person I have met so far in Moscow would find me on facebook, that I would quickly start looking up every name I could remember from high school and Columbia, and within a week would have more than 41 friends and "friends" on facebook.

The surprising thing is how many of these people I only vaguely remember. Two days after joining facebook, I found myself trying to place a "friend" whom I will call B.S. Who was B.S.? I knew I had met this person somewhere, someplace, sometime. The smile he was smiling he was smiling then, but I couldn't for the life of me remember where or when. It took two whole days for me to realize he had been the roommate of someone I had been friends with at Columbia. B.S. and I had spoken maybe three times in our entire life, and once I had my diploma in hand, I never expected to hear from him again. Yet somehow he had found me on facebook. That I suppose is the amazing thing about facebook; people you never thought you would see again--indeed, people you would probably never want to see again--can stay in touch with you forever.

There's also something vaguely disembodying about using facebook. Already I can see the potential for a facebook page to substitute for real communication. Thanks to facebook, I didn't have to contact--heck, I didn't even have to have contact information for--B.S. to find out that he's a fan of Calvin and Hobbes and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Anything you want to know about anyone, useful or othewise, it seems possible to learn on facebook. So why bother with such old-fashioned means of getting in touch with people as letters, e-mails, or phone calls?