(no subject)

This weekend I'm at the retreat for my chorus--a whole weekend of rehearsing, plus the talent show on Saturday night, which is always worth seeing, if just for the parodies of our current music. (And, BTW, they were fucking hilarious.)

During lunch, I was sitting at a table of about ten women, and the subject of facebook came up. One woman said she read about a study that showed that the more people were on things like facebook, the more likely they were to have major depression. Several commented on how online socializing is superficial, used to replace face-to-face contact, etc. etc.

....it's never been that way for me. Yeah, I have livejournal friends I've never met (I used to have a lot more). Yeah, I spend a lot of time on facebook.

But I mostly use both, these days, to communicate with people I know in person. I love knowing what's going on in the lives of my friends. I love that I know about all the upcoming social occasions. I see many of my real-life friends more since I joined facebook. And they are hardly superficial friendships, thank you very much.

I am far, far more depressed when we don't have internet access. I feel disconnected from my circle of friends and isolated from the world in general. Especially since so much goes on online, I often don't know when things are happening, or what people are up to, and people don't think to call me. Which sounds bad, but it's not like I think to call them just because I haven't seen them on facebook in a while. (The possible only exception being seams_unusual.)

I joke that I'm painfully extroverted (the opposite of people who are painfully shy) but there's some truth to it. Without a connection to a community, a tribe, I feel stranded and lost--and a bit depressed. Maybe because I was rather unpopular in school growing up, I just treasure having that circle of people. The fact that many circles overlap, that I'm part of several communities, it just makes me feel at home in a way nothing else can.

And yeah, a lot of my communication with said people is online.

I think that things like facebook and livejournal can isolate you or they can connect you. Part of it is how you use it, of course, and your attitudes going in. Part of it is who your friends are. If my facebook friends list was random people I've known in the past but don't currently have a connection with, and who don't know each other, yeah, it might feel less important or valuable.

I've heard of people who have lots of close-knit friends in college, but afterward they don't see each other, and people realize they have no real friends, or only a scattered few, and they rarely see each other. I think that college (in the stereotypical experience with dorms etc.) makes it easy for people to just be at the same place at the same time, or to make a social occasion without a lot of notice, and many adults don't have that. Whereas most of my circles of friends are defined by places and times that we can meet up to socialize that are part of a schedule, or part of the definition of the group, or that are barely planned. The Aurora Chorus obviously has rehearsals, and there's usually time to socialize at some point. EarthenGrove had regular meetings for ritual, and on our email list frequently made dates to go dancing. When my scattered friends that I met through veganism (and each other) lived in Oregon, we frequently just hung out at, say, the house on Holgate (having people share a house and/or dating certainly helped). With the bike community, there are events and rides and parties that are planned, sure, but you never know exactly which mix of people will show up to any given event, although the same faces show up to many or most of them.

I know that I am lucky in my friends. I really do not know how I became so fortunate. I can't imagine a better group of people. Seriously.