Random Thoughts

Social networking sites may be the perfect antidote for the terminally shy.

Illustration by Chris Bivins for City Arts

When I was little, my innate shyness made me hide under my bed when company came to visit. I spent hours in the dark basement during summer, sunk in my beanbag chair watching black and white reruns to avoid playing outside with the other kids. 

Over the years I have learned to compensate for this. But like an old sports injury the shyness will rear its head, sometimes when I least expect it. I will find myself frozen, unable to ask a simple question of a bus driver. (The “recovering shy” among you know what I am talking about.)

The modern age has brought many conveniences that are a boon to the shy. E-mail, for example, is a wonderful contribution allowing people to communicate directly without having to pick up the phone. Blogs are another great addition, providing a digital agora or civic gathering place that encourages public discourse, but doesn’t require real live face time.

What draws me in the most, however, is social networking. The idea of “networking” with people can be daunting, but online it becomes an endeavor that is both solitary and public. Ironically, it wasn’t too long ago that a person who was holed up playing on a computer was considered antisocial. Now those same folks might be virtual social butterflies, dexterous and knowledgeable of the ins and outs of sites such as Facebook and MySpace. 

Case in point: one of my newfound Facebook contacts is my middle school debate partner. His claim to fame is that he was an early computer hacker. A knock on the door from the FBI catapulted him into infamy and garnered him his fifteen minutes of fame on the cover of Newsweek. He was a computer geek before most of us even owned one and his hacking prowess was an impetus for the first six congressional bills against computer crime. Now a law-abiding father of two in Omaha, he is a natural on Facebook.

I was lured into joining Facebook through one of the many genius ploys inherent in social networking. I received an e-mail from a friend telling me that my husband was “tagged” in some photos they had taken in Thailand. I clicked on the link, and lo and behold, in order to see the images, I had to join Facebook. “What the heck?” I thought.

“I may as well join the modern age and give it a whirl!”

With trepidation I started clicking around on the site and started to figure it out a bit.  They make it very easy. As I filled out information, potential friends were offered up. Perhaps I know Joe Blow! He lives in Tacoma too and might want to be my friend. Or what about Sally Sue? Apparently, she and I attended the same elementary school. Gratefully, I found friends from real life who were already members and connected with them.

The remarkable thing about Facebook is that you can catch up with old or lost friends without having to bother with an awkward phone call after years of being out of touch. One of my old “real” friends told me he sees Facebook as a spider web that he keeps open to capture people from his past. People I honestly don’t remember from high school and probably didn’t ever really converse with have become my Facebook friends. We e-mail back and forth “catching up,” although aside from sharing a school during a certain period of time, we have nothing in common.

I am aware that I am a bridge from the past and that the current generation is growing up with this type of connection and communication as a given in their social lives. I can’t imagine the various intricacies of culture and etiquette that are part of the bargain as people connect again and again, forming wider webs, but I bet all of this was invented by a shy person.