newfound eternity

in a way this hasn't really happenned before. we seem to have picked up eternity as a careless byproduct of a revolution that's swept most of the literate world within a span of less than a decade. online social networks have come a long way since the days of random oldworld chat forums, where very often one would choose strange identities, to talk with other strangers with stranger identities. these metastranger conversations did not last very long. soon there was reality, a force to reckon with. and all of a sudden, i could be myself, have photos of myself, and hobbies and writings, all up there on my profile for a whiz-through tour. if i have a few smart quotes in the profile, i am profound. if i have a few 'right' movies mentioned, and hopefully some good enough pictures - sometimes in black and white, some with me looking at a distance, i am deep and intense. alternatively, i can be the party animal, showing off my eighthundred and second friend how many gorgeous people i have been with in the last however many weekends of my life. and the astonishing variety of embarrassing acts and postures that i am happy to share with all these people i call friends on my network. all eighthundred two of them. 

but then you may say 'but i don't add people i haven't met in person'. as if, meeting someone in person (even once, in a random house party with eighty people) is enough for them to be on the billboard of your list of friends (thank god for the circles of privacy that are now coming around to the social networking sites, almost reflective of a new culture that's grappling with its own developing value systems). and as if one can not be lifelong friends with people who one hasn't met. in another world, there used to be penfriends, who one would almost avoid meeting, just to relish the mystery. 

but what has really changed is how we deal with the past in public. people die, but their profiles live on. relationships die, but the pictures live on. one foresees a time in about a decade or even less, when, at any given timepoint, a sizeable number of people on a social networking site would be dead. arguably, none of us would have the exact knowledge of our lifespan, so that we can close every account before we die. we would have to be waiting for their 'inactivity' period (which ranges widely between different sites) to kick in, for our profiles to be deleted. and it is possible that other people visiting and commenting on someone's profile could very much count as 'activity' on a profile - giving a degree of eternity to the profile. for associations lesser than life and death, there would always be concrete remnants of the past that one has to carry. through photos, notes, scraps, tags and wall posts. how much of it should we share? and does my sharing something right now necessarily mean that i would want to share it five years from now?

the culture must find its own value system, its own parameters, its own limits. and it will only survive if it mimics human life as closely as possible. the age of staged conversations between staged profiles is bound to be short-lasting.