My friend called and asked me what was new in life, so I told her I'd gone to Vegas over the weekend. "Yeah," she replied in a very duh-tone. "You had that crazy drink and ridic food at the Bellagio." Uh...yeah... We hadn't communicated via voice, text, email, or any other form of direct messaging in weeks. "I saw it on your Facebook." OH.
People always say that what you post online is available for all the world to see (or depending on your privacy settings, just your "friends"), but there's still something strange about when digital and physical lives converge. I know that, when I post something on FB, others can see it and will likely comment. Likewise, I keep up with friends on the East Coast by scrolling through their walls. Yet when someone talks about my FB information in person when they never acknowledged it online, I still experience a brief disconnect. I wonder how they know these things, and my post-Truman Show paranoia flares up. My life-show's script supervisor must have screwed up his continuity.
Most of my friends will keep Facebook on Facebook, Gchat on Gchat, SMS in SMS. Every once in a while, we'll be at dinner and refer to an article someone shared online, or maybe bring up something we both saw on the News Feed--a.k.a FB's auto-stalk function--but rarely do we leave a conversation thread in one venue and pick it up in another. That just doesn't seem natural. But just as we all got used to being ever-accessible with cellphones, I'm sure we'll get used to the latest digital crossovers. Eventually. Whether we want to or not.
I used to always read my friend's walls as a sort of homework before we got together...I hope you posted you were in Vegas AFTER your return...I just read an article about thieves finding their bait online.
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