The Facebook Revolution Will Not Be Televised or Some Keys To My Youth

“Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in.”
-Michael Corleone

You see what happens? Didn’t I warn myself of the possibilities of an outcome such as this? You were looking to get away from the Internet, babysteps backwards in a slow retreat from the thing that has thieved so much of my existence in the last seven years. I am a man evolving in adaptation to his vices. My fingers are becoming molded to fit the groves of keyboards, my mind filled with domain names and internet lingo. Yes, I was trying to back away but one step forward into blogging and the levee breaks and down come the floodwaters to carry me away. I really tried to avoid the current internet craze of online networking sites like MySpace and really opted against seeking out people from my past on sites like Classmates.com. Oh, sure, I was curious on where the years had taken everybody but these people fade for a reason and sometimes it is best to just let the past go to be relived in fleeting moments of nostalgia. And then walked in Facebook, an apple held by Eve and this Adam bit into temptation.

These things start out innocent enough. I had been sent dozens of emails invites to join this Facebook site by long gone online acquaintances lingering around in the favorites list of my Hotmail account (an account which has remained the same for ten years). They started out slow, like a trickle from a pin hole in a balloon over water but these last few months the balloon burst and the water splattered all over my inbox as day after day these invites to this website became as prominent as Viagra spam. I never once investigated the site as I had no want to pursue as relationship with the people I thought I had cast out in the land of the blocked and deleted, where all online buddies go to die. Then Jay, somebody I do care for, decided to jump into the pool that is Facebook and suggested I tip a toe into the waters. That was all, just a toe, but the waters of temptation are soothing and welcoming in their warmth and a toe became a foot and a foot became a leg and a leg became total submersion and now I am under it all looking up at the sun glistening above the surface before it becomes but a speck of light in another world as I am pulled down deeper in the undertow. Yes, I am now a part of the FaceBook revolution.

If you took MySpace and Classmates.com and welded them together you would have FaceBook. Taking from Myspace the elements of creating a personal page of network contacts as well as the ability to maintain a updateable profile complete with the option to add photo albums and video clips and then adding to it the ability to search through schools, like Classmates, FaceBook quickly became one of the most popular sites in Internet history and it did so in a very short period of time. In 2004 Facebook was created by a Harvard University student. Then known as Thefacebook it attracted the membership of over half of the school’s student body and by April of that year the site would expand to include my American Colleges and Universities. By the end of the year membership to the site would surpass the one million mark. 2005 would see the site drop the “the” from its name and secure the domain name Facebook.com. It would also branch farther out by adding schools from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, the UK and Ireland to achieve a membership mark of 11 million by December 2005. In 2006 the site would start negotiations with Yahoo! and Google with rumored offers being placed on the table of up to $2.3 billion. Some recent statistics from Wikipedia:

(Approximate numbers as of February 2007).
*Users: 18,000,000
*Page Views: 30,000,000,000 per month
*Searches: 600,000,000 per month
*Photos Hosted: 1,000,000,000
*Largest Network: Toronto, ON (over 500,000 Facebook users)
*RAM in memcache servers: 2 TB
*Search Index size: 200GB
On March 2, 2007, a survey was conducted by eMarketer.com that discovered Facebook was the most viewed site by females in the United States (69%) ages 17 - 25 in 2007 and also the most viewed website by males (56%).

And now it is 18,000,001 and a new online addiction courses through my veins and I become a junky to yet another online website. Hasn’t Blogspot devoured enough of me? I didn’t quite know what to make of FaceBook once I was on the inside. I was kind of like walking into a museum with every piece of artwork, styles and eras, imaginable and you are in the center wondering just where you should begin. The emails started to come in a few hours after joining and I have to wonder if these people have my name on some sort of online alarm system which was triggered the moment I joined the site. Some of the names that showed up in my inbox were people I hadn’t thought of in years and in one or two cases decades. FaceBook allows you to add people into a group on your profile as a friends list and these folks were added as I thought up just want to say to them, how to sum up so much time gone by between the then and the now. Through Jay’s account I discovered other names and sent out a few emails of my own and with every new person added a new branch on the tree grew and sprouted leaves of new names and faces long forgotten. Soon I was connected to girls I had crushes on when I was 11, ex-girlfriends and people dating so far back in my life I can say I attended their sixth birthday party. Mainly the nebulous of these contacts are from my last three years of grade school and first year of highschool. Most of these people were not really friends of mine in my tumultuous school days as being a social outcast generally caught in the middle of the popular groupings and the berated underlings, never really sure which path I should take and as it is know pretty much remaining a person who walks to the beat of the drum he carries. Aside from Jay, no long lasting bonds were formed with my classmates that would carry over into adulthood. I had some reservations when it came to seeing some of these names under the word friend when it came to choosing whether I should acknowledge their email friend requests or not. I mean, and I have said this before, I find sites like this and MySpace are just becoming a place where people start to collect people as though they were various species of butterflies to be pasted down in a book. The youth on MySpace with hundreds of names in their contact lists are surly not maintaining solid relationships with everybody in that list and I really believe it is more for the sheer want to having the highest numbers then the want to engage into serious friendships when it comes to this trend of online human collecting. When I collected hockey cards, though there were one or two players I aspired to own, the main purpose was to acquire the entire collecting to display proudly under plastic in binders on a bookcase and there is very little difference here. Whereas I am sure there are many on MySpace with small groupings of actual acquaintances I did not want to become what I see being the bulk of users of sites such as this: an online miner of everybody in my life I have ever come in contact with so that I can increase my friendship stock in my profile buddy list in an effort to prove to anyone who happens to see it just how popular I am.

But curiosity got the best of me as did my memories. As new names poured in or were discovered in searches or in the friend lists of others I soon was taken back to my youth. Games of soccer in schoolyards. Epic contests of marbles. School trips. Girls which I lusted for so much that I was unable to take my eyes off of them and concentrate on lessons. Basement gatherings where rumors were spread and truth or dare games were played. School dances. Embarrassingly high hairstyles and equally embarrassing clothing. Air bands and stage shows performed for our parents and close relations. Failed spelling tests. Graduation goodbyes. Joining this website was like stepping inside a roller coaster cart and being rushed through 20 years of your life, all the ups and downs and stomach churning moments. So, regardless of how close I was to some of these people in my younger years, I started to add everybody with the purpose of having all these keys to my youth at the click of a button. Finding these names are like digging up old bones. They tell a story…you just have to figure out what it is. My memory is not as prolific as I thought it was as some of these people are reminding me of things that were buried under a mountain of years. In some cases that mountain is an Everest when it pertains to the amount of time that has passed.

The oldest relic in my collection of faces from my past would have to be a girl by the name of Stacy who was really the first person outside of my family that I ever knew. We were both born months apart, my mother and her mother were great friends and we grew up together on a narrow small town street. We took our first steps at the same time, babbled our first sentences to each other when we were still in diapers and we boarded the bus together for our first day of school. The years would separate us, as years are prone to do, and now through this website I can safely say I have been put back in contact with my first ever friend and that is a mountain built up on 30 decades of bygone time. In the middle of all this reliving my past and my childhood it was through Stacy (who’s mother still lives in the same house after all these years) yesterday that I learned of the fate of another piece of my youth. Last week, she would tell me, a fire broke out on our old street and it spread to the house next door burning both buildings down. The second house was the first place I ever lived, the house I was born into, and where I grew up for the first part of my life. Many memories hit me as I read her words, turned off my computer and closed my eyes. I could see my brother and I building snowforts in the corner. I could remember avoiding icicles the size of small apartment towers as they fell from our roof. I could remember my father putting up our first swing set and my mother and him trying it out with large smiles as though they were the kids swinging on into the night. I remember a fire that broke out on top of our television. I remember our record player, the size of a large coffee table, and my mother playing Elvis, singing as she made supper.I remember one night somebody pitched a metal fishing lure through our porch window. I remember being terrified of going into the basement and had nightmares of being sucked into the heating grates. I remember the day a new crib was placed in the living room and hearing the words “this is your brand new sister”. I remember hopscotch chalkoutlines in the street. I remember my mother pulling us all down the narrow road to the corner store in a red wagon we kept at the side of the house. Most of all, I remember being a kid. I haven’t told anybody this but a week before I left for Japan I returned to this neighborhood to see if I could find the ghost child of my youth running around the street with skinned knees and dirty hands. I stood in front of the old place and thought about all of the above, about being a kid, and as I am doing now writing this I could not hold back the tears. You never get those days back. When they are gone they are gone and though you try to hold onto them in your mind the years will bury them and some of them will never return to you. And some of them..some of them will just stay hidden until you find your way onto an internet site and a long forgotten face sends you so much more then an email…they send you the keys to open those doors your mind had locked and through them you are given the chance to relive the past and it is because of this I have to say I fully endorse FaceBook. In only a week I have transported into past lives and walked through many locked doors to see my childhood on the other side. If you are going to be addicted to something, folks, become addicted to memories of being a kid. Before closing here a little more on my return to Victoria Street and that first house I grew up in. When I was seven I found an ax resting up against the side of the house. I have no idea why it was there even to this day but my seven year old brain exploded at the notion of having such a weapon in my hands. I picked it up. I could hardly lift it but lift it I did and began swinging at anything I could chop. Trees. The sidewalk. Telephone polls. I was like a homicidal maniac. Eventual I was caught, my weapon removed and I was surly punished and 20 years later the incident had long faded from memory until my return this year. I had just dried my eyes and had given the old place, sadly now no more then a burned down frame, one more look. I didn’t know then it would be the last time. While walking back down the street in the ghostly footsteps of the child version of me I glanced over at one of the telephone poll. The ax wounds were still there. Faded, but there. I just had to smile at the message the younger me left as a reminder: you can leave your childhood behind but part of you is always there…sometimes hidden under the mountain of years and sometimes chunks of wood taken out of a telephone poll but always there.