October 2007
Social Butterfly
October 20, 2007 by Niña Terol-Zialcita · Leave a Comment
“You have xxx friends in your social network.”
These days, the number in this statement is (potentially) as important as your credit card limit, your account balance, or your official designation. In a day and age when “virtual” friends are as important as the “live” ones you have coffee with once a week, creating the appropriate online persona and cultivating a fruitful online social network become imperative. Gone are the days when colleagues and clients have no clue about our lives outside work and about how we spend our weekends. These days, everyone knows what everyone else does, eats, wears, loves and hates.
This often puts me in interesting predicaments: My online buddies sometimes know more about my everyday life than my best friends (my “soul sisters,” who unfortunately have yet to be bitten by the social networking bug). My beloved — the subject of most of my rosy ramblings — meets acquaintances who are “fans” of my blog and who know details of our love life. Long-lost friends and high school classmates have become close connections not because of our after-work conversations but because of the virtual hugs, drinks, fortune cookies and notes we exchange online.
