Stories, thoughts, observations, rants and dribble. Just another of my attempts to keep the interested people informed ...

Thursday, April 30, 2009

E-pology.com: could it work?

It's after 2am on a school night, and apparently there's a horn-honking insomniac convention just up the road.  It's marginally annoying, to use a completely inappropriate modifier. 

I should be trying to sleep, but the attempt will probably be futile.  Meanwhile, looking at this screen is making my eyes sore.  Maybe that will help in the long run. 

I've just been thinking about how generally useless I've been in keeping in touch with even the most important people in my life (minus the arguably lucky one or two who hear from me all the time).  I think the perpetuation of 'social networking', which is now making me think of smalltalking and greasing up to strangers in case it pays off for you in the future, has probably made it worse.  Not only has it brought me back in touch with old friends and acquaintances, it's introduced me to new people, who I will probably never even meet in real life.  These connections can all be wonderful, but they just add to the ever-increasing number of social obligations in one's life, and there can some real repercussions to what are essentially virtual social rules.  In the past couple of years, I've noticed friendship dynamics and social mandates changing as we all become more connected to each other, despite the fact that these connections can be via cables and wireless messages flying through the ether.  I constantly worry that I'm giving too much of myself away to too many people, but then I'm afraid that I will offend them if I deem them unworthy of my 'friendship'.  And as much as I want to indulge the selfish, self-preserving, privacy-treasuring parts of me, I still baulk at the idea of hitting 'delete', 'ignore', or 'block'.

There are so many facets of these new social phenomena that I want to address, but I should probably just start a "Miss e-Manners" column instead.

In the meantime, if you're reading this, there's a good chance that you may consider that I have been a less-than-ideal correspondent.  Even with (and perhaps because of) the hundreds of notifications and reminders I get, I may have missed your birthday, or let an email response fall by the wayside, or totally forgotten to do something that I said I would.  I send my deepest e-pologies.  I don't have any real excuses (just virtual ones, ha. ha. ha.).  Please don't hesitate to send me a nudge or reminder; I respond well to external motivation.

And now...I'm going to try to sleep again.

1 comment:

Eve said...

Wendy, this made me smile so much. I agree that there is a huge conflict between wanting privacy and wanting to be friendly, but the internet adds an even more complex dynamic into the mix.

I could go on, but I don't want to be all deep and meaningful in a public forum. ;)

I just wanted to say I really enjoyed this post. x