Are you ready for Facebook?

Afraid to suck

For years, I had a public presence on the Internet in professional forums and through a blog that has been running for over 6 years.

In fact, I dabbled at creating a personal homepage which went online with Compuserve in 1994 but in the process of designing the page I came across a website which was titled “Web pages that suck” with the byline of teaching you good page design from looking at bad examples.

It did not take long for me to realise that I was not some quintessential artist and my dabbling was on for a great mockery – I pulled down everything despite my long acquaintance with professional desktop publishing.

Facing the book

In all that time, I heard of the social networking sites as they evolved, but never thought much of those connections, I dared to join Twitter early last year as a micro-blogging forum but Facebook was off my radar.

It was one of my ex-colleagues who persuaded me to look into Facebook in December and since then it has been an experience.

Memories are recalled, histories replayed and long lost contacts and relationships are getting restored, some too sudden and others just about comfortable with the rush of emotions it entails.

The past revived

At the risk of becoming an emotional wreck, just one message came through and one link lead to another and my life 20 years ago was being reconstructed with ever brick falling in place, every aspiration rekindled anew, every old thought almost becoming a haunting and every smell recreating the atmosphere that had almost become a fossil of memory.

There is no telling that the kids of those days are now well into parenting whilst the parents might soon be great-grandparents – time changes, time transforms, time ages and the observer of time appears to stand still looking through the hub to the circle of timely and untimely milestones.

Are you ready?

Facebook becomes more than facing the book, you are facing the facts, facing the truths, facing the lies, facing the realities and facing the mirages – castles with moats and castles in the air – can one really assimilate all that information and remain anything like sane?

Has anyone really stopped to consider where their Facebook will take them today and are they ready to go on that journey of undiscovered connections which might well unearth things that should have been left buried if we dared to resist the peer pressure of having the book thrown in our faces?

Mixed emotions all, happy and sad, grateful and rueful, considered and inconsiderate, glad and envious – a turmoil of butterflies in the stomach and excited anticipation – you really do wonder – are you really ready for the force of Facebook?