DISQUS

Oscar · 6 months ago

These are wise words (yours and Seths), we're all time-poor, so why waste precious minutes adding folks that you'll rarely interact with and who'll clutter up your feeds (FB, Twitter, etc). Popularity? Graduating from high school should make it apparent how futile and empty that pursuit can be.

5 years ago I was hopelessly addicted to MySpace, it seemed a great way to find new and local music and reconnect with friends, particularly those OS. But with the rise in social networking, I was being approached by randoms like a Salt Lake City swingers party. The worse came early, an old friend from school whom I'd not seen in 6 years friended me, I wrote on his wall and tried to get a dialogue going. No replies, not so much as a direct message! Pretty obvious that he just wanted an impressive friend list.

I did make one true friend, a local hip hop artist who now composes jingles for my company and opened up the local hip hop scene to me. But I gave up on social networking as a mostly futile pursuit and only got back on the wagon 2 months ago. Having learned my lesson, I'm keeping the numbers down to worthwhile connections. But this post reiterated why its so important to keep connections real.