Making Friends in 21st Century

Welcome to the 21st Century...welcome.

Currently we are in the part of human history that technology has evolved faster than ever.

Mainly due to the shared knowledge across the globe - Internet.

Now we have popular social network like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, YouTube and many more.

By knowing someone name or their email address and having slightly more advanced IT skill, you can start your treasure hunting on that "someone" information and people who do that are called "Internet Creeper".

I just know that how creepy it is...Google is really a state of the art search engine.

If you want to be famous or let people to understand you easily via Internet. Feel free interconnect all your social network into one simple platform so that anyone with "average" IT skill can know a lot about you via Internet.

This somehow break the whole wonderful and magical moment of making friends. Before Internet is invented, people know each other via meeting in face to face, got introduce by another friends or matchmaker. You hardly know the person name or his/her contact number if you don't know any friends of his/her.

So sometime I have this feeling, let say today I go for a simple birthday party then I make some new friends. If one of the girls that I know from the party got to know my name and decide to "internet creep" me, then she will know many information from me via Facebook. My age, my birthday, my friends list, my occupation, my past education level, my achievement, my hobbies...if she found out my YouTube account, she will know what channel I subscribe to and what kind of media culture I am into it. If she lucky, she can even watch a video of mine. Then if she also know my blog then she will even get to know more about my recent thinking and past experiences. What if she is just a pretty, intelligent girl with high curiosity in me, because of how the social network portray me as a bad person then she just decided not to contact me in future. Of course, I don't really care about that since I don't think that I am a Saint too. But it is still a sad thing to happen just because of lack mutual understanding. It also feel weird that she can get so much information of mine without even me telling her anything except my name.

So what the point of knowing me better in the real life? In fact, there are many points to list out.

Point #1 - Understand my current self and ignore my history.

Point #2 - Validate my online social image with my real life image.

Point #3 - Simply to enjoy the moment of knowing each other better without using any other form of technology except being sincere to each other.

By understanding the pros and cons that technology has bring us.

I decide to do a reform in my life on my "online status" aspect.

By balancing the information I wish to remind myself and share with others and doesn't compromise my privacy and giving away my "story" too easy to the outside world.

No matter what Century we are in, we still have a freedom of choices to make if we willing to risk.