Web 2.0 has given us so many tools to keep in touch with each other. Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Foursquare etc, you know what is happening in your friend’s life, where he/she is standing right now, what he/she does or thinks right now and see the photo records. Then you can let others have a peek into what happens in your life too. BUT – does that really satisfy your need to interact with real people in real life?
I remember this once incident from a New Year’s eve an year back. I was single, all my friends have had other engagements or parties to attend and I had no one to keep me company to celebrate the New Year’s eve. And I felt so lonely. I logged into Gtalk, Twitter, Facebook and Orkut – but none of them seemed to matter and they just appeared to be a strange world. The whole virtual world seemed to be fake, an illusion without a human touch.
I had this thought particularly when a friend called me last Saturday and told me how lonely he felt that day as he was alone at home. He saw some of his old friends in the neighborhood and he said they also seemed to be lonely in a kind of way and he felt the need to network in the real world. Those neighbors were his childhood friends with whom he lost that touch in the course of time and he said now he understands the value of keeping a good network in the real world.
Sometimes, the virtual world seems to be throwing information overload (links! links! links!) and its kind of losing that personal touch that we all crave for. The vast network that it offers and the way it redefines the word “friend” (everyone you meet on the social networking sites is a “friend”) are beginning to seem very boring. And it makes me want to go back to that smaller world of friends that I had many years back. Smaller but thicker. These days, I am trying to spend an evening on every weekend with the childhood friends and it gives a lot of comfort and free air to spend time with them, sharing even idiotic things, laughing it off. It is so comforting. And when I see the rush of people to add more and more people to their friends list just to showcase “I’ve got N number of friends!“, I wish that they understood the value of networking with real people, in the real world. Or keeping in touch with the real thick friends they have, how small it might be in numbers.