Thursday, April 09, 2009

Making new friends is getting more complicated

People advance technology with the intention to make life better, yet in this regard it seems that it's making life more complicated.

When we make new friends we used to just exchange address and phone numbers, maybe birthdays, too.

Now, in the cyber-uber-networked age, we exchange:
1) phone number
2) address
3) email
4) Facebook
5) MSN/AIM
6) blog
7) PTT BBS ID&discussion board (Taiwanese only)
...
The list only goes on farther as more networking websites and services come into popular use. I sure am glad I haven't gotten into MySpace, Linked-in, nor twitter...

Maybe the Palm Pre's synergy would help a little to bring the IMs/text messenging/email in to one place, but it's still a little annoying to have so many protocols. Anyhow, meeting in person is still and will always be the best way of communication, if feasable.

3 comments:

sandra said...

haha . true.

through all of these channels of communication, we suppose that we know each other better. It's why people tend to exchange so many things.

intellidryad said...

I feel it's not so much that exchanging more contact infos gets people to know each other better. If some one is shy on all fronts, I just don't feel there is anyway to know him/her better unless they decide to open up that clamshell.

Yet sometimes you feel if you don't make sure you have every channel open, you'd be left out of some circle.

Phone calls confer the highest feeling of closeness, yet internet based networks has proven to be very helpful once you start to have friends all over the world, another reason to keep those channels open, since you never now which country he/her would be in the next 5 years. Internet networking does get the job done, just that it's so complicated that it makes you think, "there has to be an easier way to this".

sandra said...

next 5 years. are you talking about yourself? :P

we should meet in this summer. :P