It's been sometime since I posted but this time I have a valid excuse. I have been at last doing something productive as far as improving my skills are concerned and at last enrolled in a class to assess if I can study once again. I should know in a couple of weeks. But in the meanwhile my Serendipity as usual has been chiding me for not posting regularly and not keeping to various other promises I have made in the last few weeks. But what can be done as I always maintain these things happen.
Anyway we have been chatting about various subjects over the past few days and she told me sometime ago that she wanted to do a thesis on Social Networking with special emphasis on face book which incidentally she detests with a vengeance. I did open a face book account some time back but somehow other I still prefer emails, online video and chats to posting on walls. But who am I to criticize, it is hugely popular and has played an important role in people lives no doubt.
But this conversation started a different thought process in my mind. When I cam back to my retreat in May last year I was extremely disjointed and very disillusioned about my life and was really looking for an avenue to start communicating anonymously without all the baggage I was carrying. In other words a fresh start in life minus 52 years ( at that time ) of history. So I found a Social Networking Site and signed on. I think it was in early June 2010. For about 10 days I was very active trying out all the features, and believe you me there were some very interesting ones at that but my focus then changed towards getting back to Colombo and I lost interest and completely forgot about this till two weeks ago when this conversation came up.
I logged on to my account and found out it was still active and there had been quite a number of people who had viewed my profile which was very basic and bold I might add but I was intrigued that almost ten people had even mailed me. Now all this had happened in between the months off June and December 2010. I refreshed my memory by looking at all the features once again and spend a couple of days looking at profiles, searching for people with similar interests, participated in forums and polls and in those two days I made contact with about 10 people from varied backgrounds from all over the world, learned about so many different things, saw how other people viewed life, got input into problems that everybody faces all over the world and at the end of it all realized that this medium served a very important function in so may peoples lives on a daily basis. That was some insight to me.
Now I know a twenty Seven year old student who's philosophy in life is fascinating, a 37 year old who has a fantastic blog, somebody who flowered me an orchid which made me research and find out a whole heap of things about this exotic plant, a sixty year old Woman who wants to learn English and somebody with whom I shared this blog and got positive feed back among other things in those two days.
I also read about people whose expectations of the site were not fulfilled and those who really didn't know how to participate and get involved to find like minded people to share common interests. Of course there were those who were abusive and absolute bores but this is the net you don't like what is going on just leave.
To me it is a fantastic place to start interacting with diversity and expand my scope and comprehension on things that I like and would like to pursue for my enhancement and development and in that process get to know more and more interesting people apart from those I have known in my life so far. I am sure I will be the better because of it. Now I check the site everyday to see what is going on and I do get surprised frequently!
