Social Networking gone bad

I got off of Orkut because there were so many people on it and if one did not accept the friend requests sent offence was taken easily plus it gives one all access to everything in your scrap book and people are often reading all the scraps and nobody bothers to send “sensitive matters” as messages instead they put it in the book for all to see and instead of the person who actually wrote in the book the person in whose book it is written gets blamed and gah! You finally have a nice dirty mess.

Facebook is relatively better, I add friends and then remove them after a months time[The ones who aren't really friends.]. You get to hide certain boxes, you can block feeds from annoying people and nobody gets a peek of your profile unless you consent it or if they are on your friends list which is why it is wiser to accept only people who you know are not crazy. All was going fine until I got a friend request from a pesky kid i knew while I was growing up. Ok this guy is grown up too but his brain seems to have decided to take its own course in developing. It is still in the phase where he is learning hand and mind coordination because that is the only bit of excuse that can be reason enough for his stupidity.

Here is what happened, I accepted Pesky Kid’s friend request around 16 days back and today I get a “Friend Suggestion” from him. Now who could this friend be? Ah… it was a relative of mine who is into social networking now. Not just any relative but my favourite uncle. My uncle who is sitting in some part of the world, must be pleased to know that he didn’t have to send me a direct friend request but was instead suggested by pesky kid and knowing me he’ll know for sure that like any good kid I’ll accept his friend request. Fat chance of that happening because the moment I got wind that my relatives are on FB I told my parents that if any relative complains that I am not accepting their friend request, to just blame it on me and tell them how totally I am going to hell for doing that. [Well not exactly those words but something that implies my displeasure in wanting to socialize with my relatives on the internet. As if having them around live isn’t enough. My mother- the sweet woman in her moment of “how do I say it without sounding rude and making my daughter seem like a total anti relative girl” explained to a relative that I am on FB only because my friends are there and that I am old school and enjoy writing letters and prefer the snail mail to email.. Mothers! Now I have another task of having to sit down and actually write a letter! Having a big family is not fun. Nah ah.]

If one wonders what is really the big deal? Well I have written some mean [not really mean] things about my uncle and if he gets hold of my blog link[Which is available for my friends on FB] he’ll tell my father, who will then look at me as if he is disappointed and then I’ll either have to delete blog posts mentioning my uncle or delete the blog itself. Because I am sure he will think I was being extremely disrespectful. I wasn’t being disrespectful. I was just venting. My family is fine with whatever I do but parents are overly sensitive about the relatives. I could never figure out why. I thought boycotting family functions was ruder than mentioning relatives in my blog. There are something’s I am never going to want to figure out. The above being one such mind boggling completely contradictory situation.

I used to think my friend was smart, she waited to weigh which network had most of her relatives. She chose the one where they were least. My relatives are smarter they have joined both the networks.