I decided back in December to allow myself to integrate with the social networks my friends are on. I cringe recalling the conversation I had with myself, the one in which I discussed the pros and cons about investing physical time to places -I can’t see- in reality. (I know, reality is subjective, I question mine all the time, who are we? Do our networks make us any more real?)

So, my interest in becoming immersed in these networks is not because I want to all that much (not because I desire to waste hours everyday checking these sites,) or have any great personal investment in them (or the people on them I don’t know,) or in extending myself -to- them, it’s something else entirely. When it comes down to it, there are times when it really is easier to keep track of the people I know through three different networking sites, easier than it is through actual means of common communication. Things like, e-mail, phone conversation or even physically hanging out and interaction with each other.

Right out of the starting gate in December I had a rather distasteful experience through Facebook, and a connection I reformed with an old friend from the 1990’s I had fallen out of touch with. That interpersonal interaction went from on-line life to real life so fast I could hardly keep up with it. And like any good -bad- learning experience, I now understand why it’s good to keep a low profile in certain communities on-line. Why it’s good to safe guard your personal information, and why for me personally, nothing beats the actual face to face time you can spend getting to know someone verses the on-line time you spend exchanging only two dimensional information.

On the flip side of bad experiences are the good ones. My sister has joined Facebook. I think she mostly did so out of a bizarre kind of peer pressure and sense of obligation. At the same time, it’s very weird, and by weird I mean in a disjointed and disconnected way, to see updates on my sister’s time line about what’s going on in her life when I haven’t had the time to actually -talk- to her in real life. It makes me feel down right crappy actually, mostly because we live so close to each other and some how there are always excuses to why time escapes us. (Sorry Nicki.)

Fast forward to the end of the month now, it’s the last week in January. More people I know are joining sites like Twitter and blip.fm and even merging their blips into their tweets (which is something I’m guilty of also and indulge in often enough to probably warrant people to unfollow or block me on both sites…I tangent through blip.fm sometimes, it works better than any drunken night ever did, so why should I care?)

I think there’s something to it though (as I sift through Twitturly, feverishly comment on my friend’s Facebook updates, check in on a flickr thread, listen to blip, type this and check my gmail.) I think, and this is my opinion, all of these extensions add dimension to a hypothetical -you-. A you that someone thinks they know, if only here, on the internet, in this…illusionary space. This is why I can allow the walls still fighting against this integration to be less defnesive (despite the loud warning bells and sirens I hear firing off in my head-space at night.)