Angela has recently passed the 500 mark in listing friends on Facebook – and she was, as always, an early adapter slipping onto the servers of her alma mater when Facebook was still a universities-only preserve. So tiresome, her always wanting to be the “been there, done that” digital diva. What provokes a person to maintain so many online “friends” – and how many of them would really come over to walk the dog if she’s held over a day in Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show? Inquiring minds want to know. So here are ten questions for Angela to commemorate her Facebook milestone.
Who did you friend first when you opened your Facebook account?
I have no idea. I do know that I got my account when it was still restricted to universities — using my handy lifetime Duke alumn address — so it was probably someone from my beloved alma mater. Duke, BTW, was the first university to hand out iPods to freshmen and to put class lectures on iTunes, so I guess you’d have to say that digital literacy is in my DNA.
Do your Facebook friends fall into easy lists and categories – Family, Business, Schoolmates, etc.? Or do you just let them all hang free and interact?
They seem to sort themselves into categories, although I certainly don’t restrict them from talking to one another. It’s just that only particular folks are interested in how I was dressed at LipSync my senior year. :) I do relish the fact that, now that our friends and neighbors have joined, I can actually show them what it means to be a “social media expert.” Prior to that, I had a great deal of difficulty trying to explain what I do to the folks next door. I think they thought I was some new kind of slacker.
Have you ever dumped any Facebook friends – and can you dish the actual atrocities that sent them down to digital Siberia?
Yes, one. The matter remains private, but rest assured that it involved nothing more serious than a broken heart. Pretty mundane, in the scheme of things. Apparently Match.com exists to fix those kinds of problems.
Being out there and exposed to so many netizens, you must get some unsolicited offers of friendships by digital dumpster divers raiding their friends’ cool lists? Any that were really, really strange – and did you accept and regret?
Yes, there are some strange ones. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at sniffing those out, and they get the digital cold shoulder. I find Twitter to be a more pressing problem, actually — I don’t really want skimpily-dressed girls Tweeting nude photos to me (although I might not reject the skimpily-dressed guys). I’m sure there’s a business model for Twitter in that one somewhere ...
Do we need to actually to meet people in their retro fleshware realities anymore now that we have Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter – meeting in the real world seems so, I don’t know, un-hygienic.
There is still a vast difference between real personas and digital personas. I’m a firm believer that, at the end of the day, you need to have personal contact. Of course, I reserve the right to observe that swine flu may yet change all that.
Oh, sorceress, what will Facebook 2020 look like eleven years from now – will it be a biochip implant that projects a 3D avatar companion? Fast forward, please.
I think it’s far more likely to be like the nightmare advertising scenario from “Minority Report” – everywhere you go, you’re identified and served an ad. Facebook already does that quite beautifully, and doesn’t even need to scan your retinas.
Has your lovely daughter ever forced you to delete an embarrassing posting, saying, “Mom, you are humiliating me with that stuff!”
She tries, but she’s not generally successful. She can’t get around the fact that all her friends think I rock. (That being said, I try to be somewhat sensitive to her social scene. Geek mom, yes; retrograde-still-living-my-teenage-years mom, no.)
If Barack Obama “friended” you on Facebook or wrote on your Wall, would you tell Michele right away or use the Block People function so she couldn’t ever listen in?
Michelle is my homegirl, so I’d probably give it up to her. OTOH, I can’t say that I wouldn’t be sorely tempted to behave a little badly because the current POTUS is da hotness.
What percentage of your so-called 500 friends on Facebook would you actually recognize if you saw them eating lemon herb blinis and gnocchi at Spago’s?
Actually, about 95%. I pretty much personally know everyone I’ve friended. Profile pix and Flickr help with that other 5%. However, the one guy who actually comes over to walk the dog when I’m otherwise detained is not on Facebook — old-fashioned SMS works for that one.
Are any of the friends on your Facebook lists actually not human at all … or at least belonging to a different branch of the animal kingdom removed from our own?
I believe there are a few Cylons in the mix, but generally, they tend to be human. (There is some debate regarding our next governor Gavin Newsom, but having seen him once or twice with disheveled hair, I’m keeping him in the “human” category.)
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