Marilyn Smith

Remember when I said I don’t get the appeal of social networking Internet sites? Well, I still don’t and now it seems I am not that much alone. NPR reported the following this morning:

“A Netherlands-based computer group has designed a program that helps people quickly sever all their connections to services like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. The site, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, doesn’t just erase your account, it deletes all your friends and messages. Then it changes your user-name and password so you can’t get back in. It also changes your profile picture to a noose.”

This sounds liberating. Neat, clean, no big scenes or rings to fling into the nearest pond. It’s over. Start over.

Take our friend Andy, who never got into the social networking world either. As long as he’s had a home computer, he’s waged war with it or it’s been warring with him. Maybe they just haven’t understood each other and couldn’t find the right way to get through to each other. As of yesterday, it appears that he’s given up: he sent us a card, via snailmail,  with a note regarding the lack of a computer and no plans to replace it.

This is delightfully ironic: when we first met Andy, he worked for Royal Mail. About 10 years into our friendship, he became one of our first email correspondents. He embraced the technology like a brother. Our snailmail from him dwindled to birthday and Christmas cards. Eventually, he retired from Royal Mail in one of their downsizing programs. I have always hoped the two events were unrelated.

He was obviously rattled by having to write to us by hand this week, or maybe he was just rusty from so seldom addressing an envelope:  two digits of our house number were transposed and the name of the street was slightly off, but our own loyal USPS letter carrier got it to us anyway.

I found an old airmail envelope in the desk this morning, wrote out Andy’s address on the front with my fountain pen, and stuck on enough stamps to add up to the 98 cents that it now costs to send a first-class letter to the UK. I look forward to writing back to the man who friended us long before that noun was verbed.

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