Facebook and Old Classmates

I've been aware of Facebook almost from the beginning. In late 2005 I created my Facebook account, mostly at the insistence of some parents and district faculty members who felt it was my job as Chief Information Officer to monitor students on Facebook and MySpace to make sure they weren't revealing any personal information. After about a week of that I realized that a) if I just blocked student access to Facebook and MySpace while at school then I wouldn't have to worry about monitoring what the students were putting on those sites during school and that b) it wasn't my business what they were putting on there after school. So I pretty much quit accessing my Facebook account after that.

But right about the end of 2008 I logged back on again, and I've started using it quite a bit in the last couple of months. And a number of things have occurred to me as I've spent time on Facebook, too many things to talk about in a single post. So I'll just deal with one of them today. I came to this realization while browsing old classmates' Facebook pages:

I am inextricably tied to these people that I went to school with.

I would never have thought that three months ago. After all, with the exception of one classmate that I work with and see in a work atmosphere three or four times a year, I never see any of my old classmates anymore. I don't live in Frankfort, where I grew up, and when I go home to visit, I am keenly aware that it is not the same town I grew up in anyway. Like me, it has changed. I wrote on this blog months and months ago, when I went back to the old Capital Plaza Hotel about this time a year ago for a conference and stood where I'd had my prom picture taken, that I felt completely removed from the person I was back then and the people I knew back then.

But after perusing the "Info" pages of dozens of old classmates, and after reading their status updates and looking at their photos, what I'm learning is that--though I haven't been keeping in touch with these people--it doesn't really matter. We've all been living these lives that are amazingly in parallel to one another. We're all pretty much doing the same things. We get up in the morning and most of us need caffeine. Most of us have children, and we're proud of what they're doing and more than willing to share photos of them with the world. We're all a tad heavier than we were in high school. When the big ice storm hit, we all took photos of it, and we all loaded the photos, which pretty much all looked the same*, up onto Facebook. On our Info pages we all list the same favorite TV shows and movies. We all feel compelled to tell you 25 random things about ourselves. We all feel rushed and tired and pulled twelve different ways by life in our late 30's or early 40's. We have been shaped and molded and formed by the generation in which we have lived.

We are simply all more alike than we are different.

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*Though I have to say, some of those photos were PHENOMENAL. Some of us are better photographers than others.