Bob’s Blog

A student of mine told me this yesterday, and it made my day:

Student: *looks at picture of Teddy Roosevelt in my room* Teddy is the same as Theodore Roosevelt, right?
Me: Yup, absolutely.
Student: Yeah, he’s awesome. I like the stories you tell of him. You really got me into him.

It’s a warm 75 degrees outside, the sun is shining brightly and George W. Bush is no longer my president.

What more could I ask for?

Thank you, America for saying “Enough”.

I read an article in the latest edition of Wired, and it blew my mind. I had a similar conversation with my friend Jim a few weeks ago on the issue of Facebook/Myspace and why we’re still friends with many of those people on there, even though we never speak or see them anymore. We live in an age where we can find old friends in an instant, and hang onto friendships that died years ago. Thinking about it more, the whole thing is just weird and not natural; sometimes, it’s best to just let go of past friendships and move on.

I just looked on my Facebook and realized I don’t talk to 90% of these people anymore. What do I have in common with them? What brings us together now? None have really gone out of their way to talk to me since I graduated college. So what’s the point of just having people as “friends”? People just become numbers in a some sick popularity game.

You can read the entire article here. But here’s an excerpt:

It has been argued that this Infinite Friendspace is an unalloyed good. But while this plays nicely into our sentimental ideal of lifelong friendship, it’s having at least three catastrophic effects. First, it encourages hoarding. We squirrel away Friends the way our grandparents used to save nickels—obsessively, desperately, as if we’ll run out of them some day. (Of course, they lived through the Depression. And we lived through—what, exactly? Middle school? 90210? The Electric Slide?) Humans are natural pack rats, and given the chance we’ll stockpile anything of nominal value. Friends are the currency of the socially networked world; therefore, it follows that more equals better. But the more Friends you have, the less they’re worth—and, more to the point, the less human they are…

…Third, and most grave, we’ve lost our right to lose touch. “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature,” Emerson wrote, not bothering to add, “and like most things natural, friendship is biodegradable.” We scrawl “Friends Forever” in yearbooks, but we quietly realize, with relief, that some bonds are meant to be shed, like snakeskin or a Showtime subscription. It’s nature’s way of allowing you to change, adapt, evolve, or devolve as you wish—and freeing you from the exhaustion of multifront friend maintenance. Fine, you can “Remove Friend,” but what kind of asshole actually does that? Deletion is scary—and, we’re told, unnecessary in the Petabyte Age. That’s what made good old-fashioned losing touch so wonderful—friendships, like long-forgotten photos and mixtapes, would distort and slowly whistle into oblivion, quite naturally, nothing personal. It was sweet and sad and, though you’d rarely admit it, necessary.

“The right to lose touch”. I like that. I really like that. It’s time to clean out my Facebook.