Unlike that day 21 years ago today is grey and dark. I even felt some raindrops on the walk home.
If the comment I made yesterday on how I affected people from my generation, people I went to public school with, seems a bit one sided, it was because I was consciously disconnected from people I could have made more of an effort for. That happened later in college and grad school, later than it happened for most people.
The reason was the practical limitation of getting around. I couldn't drive and the way the group of kids were split up going to different schools and the fact that I was bussed to my high school, meant that I didn't invest much effort in people who might have befriended me, even though they have said that I had a big affect on them. There was none of the after school socializing in high school and college, when I lived at home and depended on the bus to get to and from school. That would have to wait until I went to grad school and away from my family.
I suppose that there are people even more shut-in than I who use an online community to socialize, but that didn't exist 40+ years ago. I actually saw some of the very first efforts to develop social networks, working groups connected by early BBS, and later the Usenet in the 1970's and '80's and was keenly aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Even with text only and no styling on glass TTYs and xterms, a writing ability shows, but of course it is no substitute for the rich experience of face to face contact. Multimedia, just the ability to post an image, adds depth to purely text exchanges. And there is still the challenge of being appropriate for an audience, not just of the one person your words are for, but all the other unknown people who might read it. The discussion of "The Salem Hypothesis" is a case of how remarks you make can become immortal and take on a life of their own far beyond their initial intent in a debate with one other person. This is the problem of a Blind CC of an e-mail. The sender from a forum or blog thinks the mail is going to one other when it might really go to everyone on his or your carbon-copy list, which was unintended and possibly unfortunate.
A significant feature of social networking is to be select, to avoid or exclude participation by certian people. The Usenet does not have this feature and that is its benefit or curse depending on how you look at it. On the one hand any "fool" can post, on the other dealing with random people poses a challenge to be effective and with sufficient tact that you avoid blowing a problem out of porportion. This is one of the reason for moderation, and most blogs have solved the moderation problem by being small. The blog owner can exclude posts that don't meet his criteria and unlike some Usenet and other public forums, the vetting of posts or dealing with abuse is not as big an administrative problem. One of the concerns about Facebook and other social networks is privacy and moderation. There have been abuses and there are on-going security concerns, the same kind of concerns as giving out your address and phone number, and trying to prevent unwanted contact via do not call lists. The selection tools and the relative privacy and security of your profile on one of these systems is significant and needs to be watched closely. Facebook has just added a feature to allow you to backup your profile via a zip file.
I still havn't formed an opinion about the over-all relavance of Social Networking. I had the impression that it would be Twitter-like, and with the risks of being innundated with lots of trivial short posts. That doesn't do justice to Twitter even, where people do more than just write and read 140 character posts. The Twitter profile has web site features, and the same is true of Facebook, and it is relatively easy on the latter to skip posts that don't interest one. Besides, I am fairly sure that this site, my web pages, have few if any readers, but that some people will eventually find them when the web crawlers mine them. At least here I can write somewhat freely and style the pages as I see fit. If some people enjoy them, all the better.