Quandary About Boundaries Of Social Networking

I have a Facebook account. Most of you know that, because I shamelessly hock this blog on it. Worse than shamelessly.

The nice thing about it is I can catch up with people I have not talked to in a while and find out how they are doing and what not. It’s a way of keeping up with their lives, but not actually having to talk to them, and have them REALLY tell you about their lives.

So I noticed one friend, who I was closer to back in the day, and whom I have always known as married, has now changed their relationship status from “married” to “single”. At first I kind of thought this was a bit. But when the following statuses seemed to reflect a real life, true break up had happened, I knew it wasn’t a joke.

So now my quandary… how do I go about getting the information without being a jerk? I mean we don’t “talk” anymore. At most I post a goofy status thing and this person occasionally posts a goofy comment about it. That’s it. But now something serious has happened, and I think it would be shitty of me to finally open up a dialogue just so I can find out the gritty details of this person’s newly ended relationship. And even if I did, it’s not right to have this person retread their pain one more time just for me.

I also can not ask someone else who knows them on Facebook, because all the things are posted. So if I ask Y about X then it’s all over Facebook. This social network thing is really cramping my ability to gossip.

Perhaps this is the problem with social networking, its closeness without true closeness. You are involved with people’s lives, but only at a distance. Yes, you now if they are married, dating, have kids, lost their job, what ever. You just REALLY don’t know what their day to day lives are like.

I guess for that you need to keep interacting with people and not the computer. And if they are important to you, don’t let them be someone you only see on Facebook.

So for my friend’s relationship status, I guess I will never know. I guess I will just have to make it up.

Probably juicer that way anyway.

Jason