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April 08, 2009
Life : Out of Sight, Out of Mind
One of the banes of modern life is the phenomena "Out of Sight, Out of Mind". While we all have many people we would like to keep in touch with, we are also all way too busy to be particularly effective at that. The result is that, unless something happens to remind us of someone and we find the time to contact them before the mad rush of daily life drives them out of our minds, we don't actually stay in touch with many people.
I have an additional problem in that I have been bi-coastal – spending my teen's and twenties on the east coast, and the last two decades the west coast. The result is that I have been particularly bad at keeping in touch with people from the first half of my life – not because I am not sincerely interested in what has happened to them; but because there is too little to bring them to mind here on the west coast.
There is however at least a partial solution . . . Facebook
While I signed up for Facebook a couple years ago so I could check something specific out, I never did much with it until recently. Two things changed that. The first is that I got a mailbox full of friend invitations from old co-workers at GCC (people who I definitely wanted to stay in better touch with). The second was that Anne and I discovered that many churches in San Francisco make extensive use of Facebook to keep their communities informed.
Based on that, I decided to take the plunge and embrace Facebook, and am quite happy that I did. For those old (and current) friends who are on the service, it is a great way to stay informed. They are no longer "out of sight" since I see periodic updates on them, and Facebook makes it easy to send notes, so that while they are "in mind" I can quickly contact them if I have anything to share.
I've put a moderate amount of effort into my profile to reflect who I am – including setting up a couple of apps to track my book reading and television watching. I don't think I'll do much more in the immediate future. I am also trying to update my status at least once a day for those people who care about what is happening to me.
The only downside is it leaves me in the position of shilling for Facebook as I try to encourage other old friend who I still know how to contact to join the service. Ah, well, such is modern life. At least most of my old friends are tech-savvy, so getting them online isn't a problem.
One side effect of this is that you are likely to see fewer "life updates" on this blog – I will be posting most of that information on Facebook and keeping this for my more thoughtful contributions.
Posted by Steven at April 8, 2009 05:00 AM
