A site about new media via new media

A number of projects concerning XML and its markup brethren are on the way. Stay tuned for the first of my new media projects coming in the next month.

People debate whether social networking really falls in the category of new media. Putting this debate aside, it is undeniably a major shift in how we perceive people and the world around us (and for the record, I believe it does fit as a new media). How does it change our lives, and is it for the better?

I recently attended a wedding of an old friend from high school. We had spoken a handful of times in the years since high school, but I have not seen her since 2002, aside from a passing moment the next year. And even though we had spoken those few times between then and now, it was minimal. And when I told my friends who I see week in and week out that I was driving five hours on a Saturday to attend a wedding of someone I had not seen for five years, I got confused stares. As I inquired why I was receiving such looks, eventually I was given the answer of “That just seems… odd.”

Maybe it was because I went to a small school where literally everyone knew everyone. Maybe it was because I had known the majority of my high school graduating class for 10+ years since it was K-12 school. But it didn’t seem weird to me… and in this day and age, it shouldn’t seem weird to others.

When I graduated high school there was no MySpace madness and no Facebook frivolity. So when my class parted ways for college, we had no ways of communicating. We tried an email list, but no one used that after the initial “Here’s how to use the list - this will be great!” email. Phone numbers and email addresses changed. No one got on AIM any more. We lost contact… for the most part. That is, until the last year of college when people started signing up for Facebook as it expanded to more than just the initial Northeast universities. All of a sudden I knew what Harv looked like now… and that Anna was going for Med School. I even learned that George was majoring in sociology, even though we had moved to the same city and saw each other fairly regularly. Learning more about my old friends took time, but I felt it worthwhile.

So, on the one hand, we have it’s a good thing. People who graduate high school today are typically already on facebook, so as they move to college they don’t have to search for old friends and process whether or not it will be awkward to friend them since it’s been X years since they last spoke. They’re plugged in from the get-go… and though their direct communication drops since they no longer see each other every day, their indirect communication ramps up.

Which leads us to a more questionable area - indirect information. Since joining Facebook, I have often talked to my family or other people who know these old friends of mine. They ask me how so-and-so from high school is, and I immediately tell them. Oh he is engaged now, and she is working at an IT firm now. I say it without the slightest hesitation. Have I talked to them recently? No. Have I talked to them in the past three years? No. Five? Maybe once. More? Who knows, probably not much. Yet I know these things about them.

At the aforementioned wedding I attended, seven of my old high school friends were there, too. We sat at the same table and caught up a bit. But we already knew the basic questions like “Where are you living these days? Did graduate last year or this past May? Where are you working? Married/Engaged/Dating/Single?” We mostly reminisced, which is great, but it could have been more. We already knew the basic questions, so why not go further? As I said before, most of us had known each other for 10+ years before graduating and leaving our homes for college, but we missed out on the last several years, where our ideas and philosophies changed. If we had started off with those basic questions, I feel it would have helped as a transition to the more real conversation. But thanks to our indirect conversations through social networking, we kind missed out.

They’re not perfect, and the have some hiccups in real society, but social networking sites are getting bigger each day. And we are past the point of saying they will change the way we look at the world as a whole. They are. And we can get past the setbacks if we don’t rely solely on these sites. Direct contact (even through e-mail… or a “wall post”) is pretty nice… and then feel free to enjoy their latest pictures from their vacation to Canada and a two minute video of them playing a board game.

Welcome.