Do you have a Facebook account? Or maybe a Friendster account? I have both and I know people do, too. If they don’t have both, they have either one, or maybe a different account like Myspace or Multiply. There are also those who don’t have neither like, unfortunately, my very own boyfriend. They, when confronted “Hari gini?? Ga punya Facebook??”, would say it’s a pointless and absurd thing that only belong to people who have ‘no life’.
Well, part of it is true. At least for me. I DO not have a life. I’m unemployed, people! But, life comes in many ways. Not just the concrete, flesh-and-blood life where you can actually talk to people and watch they move and smell their stinky body odor and slap people in the face or wave your middle finger to them when they piss you off. Many people also lead another different life where you can make yourself thousands of names, have multiple free address, make a face from punctuation mark, and even have sex without intercourse. A life in a world called the internet. In the era of internet, you can’t call people who are incapable of oral conversation and not lively in social event (I mean, geeks like me), don’t have a life. Because, it’s more than just possible that they might be an influential blogger under several pen names (or should I say, keyboard names?) in the internet. Or they might have more than one date in a matchmaking chat room.
As the internet grows, virtual and real world kind of blend together. People realize that through the internet, everybody could turn out from nothing into something. Open a blog or a personal website, then you become somebody. Who doesn’t know Raditya Dika in Indonesia? Or Perez Hilton? Google my name: “anastha eka” and you’ll even get something. Even better now, you don’t have to write a blog or build a personal website. Create an account on Facebook, google your user name, and voila! You’re there. You find your existence. Then, pseudo names are less popular now. People want tofire be recognized as themselves instead of stupid fake names like cutie_me or ce_lutchu.
Being recognized as a face to a name isn’t enough, though. It also involves character, relationship status, educational background, your likes and dislikes, and in extreme cases, play-by-plays of your daily lives. This leads to a phenomenon called microblogging. You must be aware of shoutouts in Friendster or Mini Feed in Facebook where you can share what you’re doing, thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, practically everything that happens at the moment in your life. That is microblogging: sharing every bits of your life to the ‘world’. Do you know how it feels when you have a secret crush or a celebrity obsession, you crave the details of what he or she doing, of his or her personality, then your friends started to call you a stalker? That is microblogging. Instead of a secret crush, it’s an acquaintance from the internet. Instead of a celebrity obsession, it’s your college friends. By joining social network websites like Twitter, Plurk, or Tumblr, you have an access to your network’s lives and become a stalker. Not just a stalker, you’re also being a stalkee, the one who’s stalked. Like, I changed my relationship status to Single a couple weeks ago and since, people have been asking questions whether I break up with my boyfriend or not. It’s weird first, but sooner or later, you’ll enjoy (and even addicted) being a stalkee. Because deep inside everyone wants to be exist, to be recognized, to be a celebrity. Screw Britney Spears and the paparazzis! Now, YOU are both Britney Spears and paparazi, all at once!
Then these days, internet not just helps you to discover another life, it helps you rediscover and complement your life. Makes you love the way you live and boast it. A growing phenomenon this NY Times article call, “modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme”.
Endless Status Updates w/ Plurk
I found a link to the article from a random blog. It’s quite a catch actually, despite its length and fancy words (at least for my mediocre English). But I can ensure you, it’s worth your time of reading. The article covers the growing internet frenzy like Facebook and Twitter where not only you can show the ‘world’ who you are but also make you feel intimate even with someone you barely know. Like, I have this ‘friend’ on my Plurk account. We never met face to face, only through Plurk, but I know that yesterday he had to sleep in his office and had sahur there. Whereas, at the same time, I know nothing about what my best friend, Tita, did because she doesn’t Plurk.
Quoted from the article:
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.
Just like celebrities, not only good things appear. You have to be cautiously guard your closet. I have friends and relatives whose boyfriends’ ex or admirer use social networking websites to attack them. These fierce formers send vicious comments directly to my friends or talk my friends around through their own profiles. People can also post photos of you that you don’t want to share and tag them with your name. They can freely judge who you are based on how many friends you have, who they are, and how you look on your photos.
“Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching — but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.”
So, are you in this too or just an observer? Because if you are in this, please take a minute to check out my currently active Friendster, Facebook, Plurk, Flickr, and Last.fm. 
You can also find me in LiveJournal, Multiply, Blogger, Tumblr, and Twitter, but they’re not updated anymore. Hey, I even once made a Myspace and a hi5 accounts, but can’t remember the logins. And if you’re not, the article says:
If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.
i want you to leave something here