However, my fascination has led me to investigate new applications of sociological phenomena, and especially to examine emergent technology and its effect on society as a whole. Being able to predict why people act the way they do has been instrumental in lowering my stress when dealing with the world at large, as it allows me to apply logic to an inherently illogical creature.

For this reason, I have been rather obsessed with Facebook and it's kind since I heard about it; not just dealing with online chatting and catching up, but how it appears to alter typical behaviour. I have been a member of the site since February of this year, and have located and reconnected with several friends who I consider quite important to me, and who have fallen out of touch. In that regard, Facebook is a fantastic resource, if just for the fact that everyone appears to have joined up, and you can find your best friend from Grade 3 and chat.

However, the part that really has gotten me mulling over the thinking some people engage in involving Facebook occurred quite recently, and made me realize that, despite my efforts to the contrary, I can be just as short-sighted and biased as most other people. Let me start, though, by giving you my definition of friendship.

As I have mentioned before, both here and in my podcast, is that I view a person as, in the simplest terms: the sum of the experiences they have been through, tempered by their biological predisposed reactions. A person is made up of the memories of who they are, and how they've affected their development. Hence, your personality is a combination of what your parents gave your genetic code, after being tempered by various situations and stresses. I know it may not be very romantic, but it feels logical.

Friendship, then, following that definition, can be defined as someone who has shared your experiences, and added to the positive aspect of it in your eyes. Whether that's making it easier to be in a Vietnamese POW camp, or simply the horrors of Mrs. Ryall's grade 2 math tests, a friend is someone who increases the pleasure of your life, and shares experiences.

Facebook friendship appears, to my eyes, to sometimes be little more than name recognition. There's already a social stigma attached that makes people feel the number of friends they have determines their value as a person. If you know someone with 300 friends, you know what I mean — no one socializes with 300 people regularly, but it is mighty impressive on screen. My own list sits somewhere at around 115, and I'll be honest about the breakdown: About half of those are family. Yes, I have a big family mostly composed of young adults. Another quarter are people I do socialize with in "the real world" quite regularly. The real reason you have links with those people online is to engage in silly games and applications, and share photos and videos.

The remainder of my list are split about even in old friends I'd lost touch with, and people who recognized my name from high school yearbooks, and added me on that basis. And the behaviour doesn't always match the way you left things. Sometimes, people who wouldn't turn their head to look at you in high school send glowing notes telling you how they've missed you, and serious and sincere queries into your family life. Other people you thought were important to you will ignore your attempts to contact them, and cause you to scratch your head in confusion. It's funny to me how apparently, people viewed events from a different perspective than you, and what you thought was an important relationship that helped define you as a person could be a passing annoyance to others.

Of course, this was something I could look at objectively until this weekend, when I walked out of an Esso station and saw this woman puffing away on a cigarette, at least a hundred pounds overweight, pushing two kids around, and I was disgusted. I shuddered to look at her, and then a moment passed, and I realized I knew her. Not only knew her, but had been in her class, and chatted with her, and played kissing tag (and later, our dirty Grade 2 evolution of such: Humping Tag) with her, and had talked with friends about her early breast development.

I was advanced for a Third Grader.

But that proved to me that I wasn't immune to the ravages of time on the social barometer we all have. If someone who grew up alongside me, and impacted my life enough to give me story material could then cause my stomach to turn, obviously I'm not as apart from this phenomenon of "selective memory" as I thought.

But at least now I'm aware of it, and can react better to those who are nice to me, despite the harsh treatment they gave me in school. I like to think of it as "growth".

My dilemma, as it were, concerns the cycle I find myself in, largely due to my newfound infatuation with the Facebook phenomenon. This one tool has redefined the boundaries of time and space, in terms of social connections. People can find each other over the years, like no time has past. People that have moved far beyond where we would ever visit or even call (the cost would be atrocious!) are now easy to connect with, catch up with, and spy on.

This ease of finding and connecting to some people, namely myself, is like a kick into the deep end of your own personal pool. And you end up inspecting what's on the bottom, whether you like it or not, with your face inches away from those things.

And you discover some interesting things.

When you see a familiar name on a page, it immediately brings back every positive association you ever had regarding that person. All the great times, no matter how scarce, resurface, and you feel genuine joy in the discovery. You share updates — talk about your amazing marriage, your kids, your job, and where you are in your life. And for one or two messages or wall posts, everything is great, and you wonder why you ever lost track of this person.

But that's only at first.

For someone like me, the negative first starts rearing it's ugly head when the web of friends and connections begins to grow. Maybe that one person, by themselves, isn't that bad a thing. But when combined with that dude who laughed at you in French class, and then that girl who looked at you like you were a leper at the school dance — well, it begins to take shape. That sparkly thing at the bottom of the pool is just the leading edge of something sharp and dark.

Maybe the new names aren't 100% familiar, so you take the next step. You pull out the yearbook. And you notice how many of the signatures are for people that you didn't lose touch with, and maybe that's the reason. How the people you find on Facebook aren't all that close, and aren't all that positive in your memories. Maybe you look at the clubs you joined, or the classes you took, and realize that the people you most want to find aren't the ones you do find.

Granted, I'm not the rule; I'm definitely the exception. Most people are pleasantly surprised how the years fall away, and how they can embrace their old acquaintances as new friends. How similar the jock's life and the nerd's life ended up. Or maybe that bully felt bad all those years later, and wants to make amends, without actually coming out and telling you that's what he's doing.

I'm not there yet. I know that at this point. The paranoia is still in full effect, and it's forming a barrier to me being completely comforted by the old connections. Maybe if I could mix and match, new friends and old. Right now, my current friends don't really know any of my old friends, so it's tough to point and say "Hey! Look! Remember them?" There are some — don't get me wrong — but it still seems like a couple of us looking down at the bottom of the pool and saying "What the hell is that thing? I don't remember! Is there a reason it's down there?"

*sigh* Guess I'm due for a swim… 

I realize that typically Tuesday morning would be the new podcast, but my wife is ill, and I really didn't feel up to recording last night. I should be able to get it done tonight, and post it tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I found myself pondering something that I have touched on in the last podcast, that I wanted to explore with a little more depth, here in the pages of my blog.

And that's my tendency to constantly, and sometimes to the great annoyance of others, reference the past.

In preparing this blog, I went to Quotiki and tried to find a suitable famous quote dealing with looking back, and the positive side of that, and was shocked to find that there were none appropriate. Every famous or significant quote seemed to shun the past, and advocated never looking back at all. That, to me, seems to sum up most of my friends expressed feelings on the matter. I've been accused of "not letting go". I've been questioned on whether I see the past as my "Glory Days". I've been told that I can't focus on the present because I live in the past.

All of which is bullshit. Seriously.

Be aware that I believe all the following very strongly. I'm not just trying to justify my way of thinking, and my behaviour in a group — I am trying to educate people on the value of the past. As said in the podcast, I believe that human beings are, for the most part, a direct result of events from their past. If the events that occurred in their past had not happened, they would not be the same.

Now, I'm aware that's a rather simplistic, and some would say obvious, definition. But if it were obvious, clearly no one would have a problem reliving the past, as we'd all be aware of how important it was. My definition of friendship is closely tied to this view of the past — friendship is a series of shared experiences, where the person you share it with added to the positive value of the experience. Now, I find that storytelling and reminiscing are two different things. I'm constantly accused of doing the former when I'm doing the latter. What I'm really doing is combining the two actions in one. And I'll tell you why.

Friends who are constantly together do not need to reminisce much. They are together often enough that they are always experiencing new things. But why don't they touch on the past as well? Because reminiscing is revisiting touchstones in a friendship. It's reliving experiences in order to solidify a relationship. I find this happens more the less people see each other. There's a natural tendency for friends, as they get older, to have less time available to spend with each other. If they have girlfriends or boyfriends, spouses, children, busy careers — the time just isn't there to go and make new memories with their friends. And so when people reconnect with a friend they haven't seen in 4 months, they may be still friends, but there's an awkward gap. So much has happened in the meantime, so much time has passed, that a large chunk of their life has become defined without the other person there to be a part of it.

And so, to make sure the friendship is still strong, a necessary revisiting of common events you both were involved with in the past brings the two of you closer in the memory. Remembering how drunk you got, or how funny that one time was, or how that life-changing even affected both of you, is something that erases, slowly and gradually, the time that passed without them being significant in your life.

I do this for people, because I believe what has happened in our lives is important to remember. It's important to remember the mistakes, so you don't make them again. It's important to remember the triumphs, to relive how that helped you. Positive memories aid self-esteem, and negative ones provide growth and learning material. Our parents only donate so much in the genetic material — adopted children tend to behave more like their adoptive parents then their biological ones. Knowing where we came from isn't as important as what we've been through. Most people subconsciously agree with this theory, which is why there are so many people with cameras, and huge caches of old photos. This is why people keep diaries — if the past wasn't crucial, why write it down?

I may be more focused on my past than most, but I feel that in doing so, I not only understand myself better, but understand my relationship with others, and my strengths and weaknesses. I mean, when you have a problem you can't get around, and you go to a therapist, or psychologist, or such, what is it they tend to do? They take you through your past, to try and establish where your problem originated, and why you can't solve it on your own. If you think about it, I'm really only performing a constant analysis on myself, which allows me to deal with my problems as they arise, and not let them build to a potentially explosive level.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone needs to be constantly looking backwards, mind you. But I think it's shameful how many people try to bury or ignore or downplay the importance of their past, and refuse to see how it reflects on the future. We are all a product of what has come before, and it defines who we are, and how we will react in the future. All change is necessitated by observing the past. I always greet people from my past with gusto and enthusiasm — they are part of my growth process, and deserve to know that they have defined me in part, and become part of the foundation of who I am.

I think this makes sense, except in my case, I read from the book for people to hear, so they know and feel how they are a part of MY story. And I think it makes me a better man because of it.

I guess there is one quote that sort of relates, and I'll post it here:

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."
– Virginia Woolf

I think this makes sense, except in my case, I read from the book for people to hear, so they know and feel how they are a part of MY story. And I think it makes me a better man because of it.