Social web browsing and other inquisitions

An amusing way to while away a wet and rainy afternoon is to cycle through blogs by clicking on the interests that you have listed for yourself and going through the blogs of those who share similar interests. Similarly, if you keep bookmarks on sites like del.icio.us as I do (though I got into the habit of doing it for practical reasons rather than sociability) then it becomes quite interesting to see who else has bookmarked a rather obscure site that you thought would be of interest to only to yourself. I look through their blogs or examine their profiles out of curiosity and the desire to discover other sites of interest, using these people as intermediaries, so to speak; just another way in which our society can be understood in terms of being a network of gargantuan proprotions. So in this manner I come across new sites of interest, a new web service to play with, new authors, new television shows. I will never contact these people and tell them that we share common bookmarks, why don't we be friends: nonetheless, for people with hermit-like tendencies such as myself, this is yet another reason to stay in my room and let the twenty-inch screen of the computer become my window to the world, and engage less in actual social interaction.

Because this, after all, is what friends do: they share music, books, experiences, ideas; and this comes before, and with the best of relationships, remains constant even as they become shoulders to cry on when a boyfriend leaves or take you home when you've embarrassed yourself at a party or take you to task when you've done three tabs of acid four nights in a row. And much as I value that, and think of my friends as family when my own is scattered across the globe and far away, I value the other aspect every bit as much: the quotidian exchange of information that no algorithm of recommendations will be able to replicate. The quirks and mannerisms, the eccentricities of personality, the unqiue way of speaking, the stories they tell over and over: these are, after all, what endears them to us, why we love them, the reason we say we know them. I have always felt that if I were to meet someone exactly like myself I would detest her immensely: the girl in the mirror is myself; but if she were to take on a life of her own and climb out from behind the looking-glass she would be someone I would want to throttle. There is a belief in popular mythology that if you wake up in the middle of the night and see someone who looks like yourself standing in the distance that it is an omen of death; perhaps there is a psychological underpinning to this bit of folklore.

We like our friends because they are different than us, but we love our friends for the extent to which they are of like minds to ourselves. Perhaps the decisive moment comes when in the course of time together and going through experiences together, that despite all you have in common that you hold a same or different morality. And the revelation of this morality, I have come to find as I grow older (but necessarily any more mature and certainly not nobler of thought or virtue) can be as much in the course of cataclysmic events as in quotidian companionship: in laughter; in its absence. When one moves beyond the family one is born into to "family" as defined by the people you surround yourself with, that one makes and chooses, the stakes become just a little bit higher. And this, I am firmly convinced, is a good thing.