Yesterday I finally capitulated to the growing pressure from family and friends (both of them) and joined the Facebook revolution. Having now placated said family and friends (and you two know who you are!), I now find myself under the unexpected further pressure to quickly garner as many Facebook friends as possible to avoid looking like an e-loser.
It should be an interesting process. Will it be similar to the traditional species-area relationships in ecology where you find that your first search efforts yield loads of new species, or friends in this case, and then over time you see a tailing off as the rate at which you add friends diminishes? At some point you will hit the asymptote and only occasionally discover new friends with the assistance of large amounts of financing from National Geographic.
Or maybe it is completely the opposite. Maybe the process of gathering friends is instead a positive feedback loop, whereby you start slowly at first but then quickly gain exponential momentum like some uncontrolled burn or nuclear reaction, owing to the n-to-the-n power promise of the Internet neighbourhood, such that when you’re done you’ve got as many friends as there are Internet users. Then again, you’d likely not keep up anyways, especially with the prolific increase in Russian internet users who regularly send me kind words about my blog. I just wish they’d learn a bit more English. It’s all rather broken and hard to follow, especially with all those embedded links…
Ultimately I hope that the process is fun and does not create yet another set of e-xpectations in terms of keeping up with e-veryone about e-verything when really I’d rather just spend time puttering in the garden instead of say, oh, writing a blog for instance.
Then again, I am now clued into my sister’s need for a new coffee maker and feel that much closer to her electronically if not spiritually. Even though we are literally oceans apart, I can now share in her quest through the veritable cornucopia that is undoubtedly the American coffee machine market (and we thought there were a lot species?) until she locates the mythical machine worthy enough to fill her Holy Grail with that perfect cup o’java.
Godspeed dear sister!