Plastic Fantastic

Oddly, when 1960s TV programmes imagined the 21st century all the inhabitants flew about in sky cars, wearing silver clothing and white lipstick and having everything at home done by a robot. The one thing that they didn't envisage is the online world. I got through my degree without ever emailing, using Wikipedia, Googling or moaning about deadlines in my Facebook status. Nowadays I get a bit shaky if I haven't been online in a few hours and often find myself surreptitiously checking the net on my mobile. It's an addiction.

Being a single mother I am home alone. A lot. In particular, on weekday evenings I have to stay in when my son is in bed. This gives me a few hours alone. I could use this time profitably doing some work, or reading all those novels I haven't read, or taking up an improving and impressive hobby. Instead, I sit in front of my laptop for hours blatantly time wasting.

Now it will not be a surprise to you, dear reader, that the internet can fill in a space where a life should be. There's Facebook to be stalked, blogs to be written, Youtube to be chortled at, all sorts of spangly lovely things to be bought, Wikipedia to be idly flicked through, whilst checking back on to your emails every half an hour or so. Hours of your life can pass like that.

Over the past year I've indulged in a spot of online dating. I've emailed quite a few guys and chosen to meet two separate blokes for a real date. The problem is the real world just doesn't live up with the online world. Online, guys are always handsome (because you see only the good photos); email conversations tend to be great as if you can't think of an appropriate response you can disappear off for a potter about until inspiration strikes and the witty rejoinder can be typed up. Online guys are 6 foot and funny. In real life they can be 5 foot 10 at best or rather too overweight or a mite sweaty or a bit dull. It's most annoying.

So, of course this post is a circuitous way of saying that I'm in the middle of an online thing again. It's cool because he ticks the boxes really well: tall, absolutely beautiful, musical, artistic, and erm, 27 ;-). Online it doesn't matter if his feet smell or he's a serial killer because he's my construction of perfect. The problem is in real life he's almost certainly not perfect and so if we chose to meet up I'm going to be a tad disappointed. But I might not be. But then when you can have online perfection, why trade?

Friends Reunited

These days the idea of not 'Social Networking' is anathema to most. Kids who absolutely loathe me whilst being taught by me seem to feel no sense of irony in requesting to be my 'friend' via Facebook. Similarly, I feel no sense of irony when I ignore their request. Facebook, in particular, has brought me closer to old friends with whom I had lost touch. Through my Facebook addiction I can keep up with their partners, their children and whether or not they are good at WordTwist. Facebook also lost me my marriage, as it was via Facebook that my ex got together with his new girlfriend. I knew something was up when my own husband (at the time) refused my friend request and kept shutting the laptop screen down quickly whenever I came in the room.

However, when I was at University in the years 1989 to 1993, our social networking was limited to writing notes on each others' doors and bumping into each other in coffee houses / bars / megabops / the all night garage and, extremely rarely, lectures. We did not text each other. We had never sent an email. We didn't arrange events on Facebook. Nobody had a landline in their flat and in the Halls of Residence 48 people or more shared one public payphone. However, even without the simplest tools of social networking the friends I made in my University days are still some of the people I hold most dear in my life.

This weekend just past some of my closest friends and I assembled in a youth hostel in the Dales for a reunion. The spurious reasoning behind the event was that on the 8th October 1989 we started University, so nearly 19 years later we are as far away from that first day as we were the minute we were born. I did the majority of the planning and I used the social networking site Facebook to create a group for the event and email out the plans.

So what did we do over the weekend? We discussed how things had changed. The world now is unrecognisable. The last time we were all together, in 1993, the Americans had invaded Iraq and the world was going into a major recession. House prices were tumbling. Inflation was rising. How things change. Back in 1993 I was resolutely single and refusing to countenance the idea of having a boyfriend and I'm right back there again. Some of us are a bit bruised and battered by child-rearing and single motherhood. Most of us are greyer. Some of us are in the major league of blogging (e.g. Highwaylass). But, as a social network we support each other and I feel that we are all the richer for our shared experiences. Facebook might have brought us back together again but the friendships stretch a long way back to the days before any friendship was digitised. All these people were in my life long before I met my ex and I hope they will still be in my life many years into the distant future, whatever social networking looks like in those days.