I am about to make a public volte face with regard to my feelings towards Facebook. Despite sustaining a deep urge to turn every event in my life into a status update-worthy soundbite, I now regard the whole set-up with something approaching awe and wonder.
As more people are online, having become “Facebook friends” with their immediate circle, they must all be thinking (as I am): “What happened to so&so?” Motives for doing this are many and various, from the genuinely concerned to the slightly more vicious (me too!). However, the long-term result of this is that genuine friendships that had expired for genuine/circumstantial reasons have been rekindled. This leads me to the awe-and-wonder part, where I seem to be existing in many of my own time zones simultaneously… and I never was any good at physics.
The most recent provocation of this sense has come from seeing pictures of the horses, stables and people from where I first learnt to ride. As I am in none of these pictures, I can’t have figured heavily in these other people’s pasts, but seeing them transported me back vividly to my own childhood. And funnily enough, many of the old friends I have encountered on Web2 share the equine connection!
