James Andrews

I’m pretty active on the internet in one way or the other. I spend a lot of time surfing, chatting, learning and generally using up as much bandwidth as possible. When I first came online it was for the purpose of Mudding (Multi User Dungeons). It was a way to feed my childhood D&D hack and slash obsession without the stupid role playing, or having to make character sheets all the time. After a while I started making friends and all was good and fun, until the MUD I used went offline. About the same time I was hanging out with people in Harvard Square, and getting involved with the Goth scene. I joined the local mailing list called “net-goth”, and got involved with alt.gothic on Usenet. Which allowed me to make numerous friends, some who I’ve met in real life others who I have not.

These days the big rage are social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. They have been convenient in letting people reconnect with people that you haven’t seen in years. Through games, status comments and what not, you meet new people virtually, and sometimes make new friends. Life is good.

What happens though when people you have left out of your life for on reason or another try to connect with you. For example. Let’s say you have a real life friend who has a real life friend who you don’t like. Both are on Facebook. Now you are Facebook friends with your real life friend, and they’re real life friend friends you. What do you do? Do you add them as a friend even though you can’t stand this person just to be polite? Do you ignore them because of your dislike for them? What do you do when you see this person at some real life social function and they get all upset because you ignored their “friend request”.

This has been mulling around my brain for some time now. I have received probably a half dozen friend requests or friend referrals on Facebook to people who I felt was either not close too, or to people who I don’t want to associate with. Most have sat in my “request queue” for about 2 months now waiting for me to act on them. Today I made the decision to act on them, and clicked ignore for all of them. What it came down to for me really was if I wasn’t close to them in real life and I didn’t meet them in my virtual life, why would I want them in my virtual life? My Facebook profile is set to private, I don’t necessarily want everyone I know, knew, or am related too having full access to my pictures, comments and what not.

In retrospect I guess it really depends on what you do with your virtual life and how much information gets out, but I personally just feel that people are letting too many people access information on their life, and that they really should think twice before allowing their gossiping aunt access to their profiles…