Hey look, its me...me, me, me

(Before I start...if anyone can tell me why blogger sometimes adds extra lines between paragraphs and sometimes removes all of the lines I add between paragraphs, I'll be very grateful. I give up for today. The one-time English teacher in me is made nutso by the fact that I can't get the formatting to work properly in this. Maybe I need to learn HTML so I can control the universe. Take over the world. Yes, that's it!!)






Okay, sitting at lunch on Sunday, someone who will go unnamed (but really, the options are somewhat limited by where I am and how few people I know here) asked me why a person would have both a Blog and a FaceBook page. She had just set up her first blog and was wondering if she really wanted to take the FB plunge.

My response -- at least the short and first one -- was simple: narcissism.

Okay, I'm not talking about clinical narcissim as described in this interesting article in Psychology Today. I'm talking about the tendency some of us have to need to connect to people and the strategy that seems to say that if I put myself out there, others will reciprocate by offering some of themselves in return. It is a relational exchange gone cyber. It is web 2.0 at its simplest common denominator. (And blogging and FB, along with the evil twin MySpace, are basic 2.0 environs.)

So, to illustrate I took a photo of myself in the mirror of myself on the screen with my webcam. Being a "half" art major in college, I sat in enough early morning critiques to know that I could find all sorts of other symbolism in the photo -- symbolism that is there, but that I didn't intend.

I have a word for that...placing prior intentionality on current reality. Shoot...Heather? Aileen? Can either of you remember what I called that?

The point of all this? You tell me.

Yesterday, my friend -- the with whom I'd had lunch and who was wondering whether she should jump into 2.0 with both feet or just one -- she took the plunge. So, if you've recently recived a friend request by a FB newbie who happens to be in Manila right now...yeah, it's probably her. You could be Jessica Fletcher with all that deductivity.