This has happened to most of us, I think.
You’re checking your email or perusing Facebook when you see a notification that some name from your past that you haven’t seen or thought about since high school, middle school or even elementary school has just tried to “friend” you. Or you’ve been on the other side… trying to connect with an old friend.
We all deal with these with varying degrees of openness or harshness, depending on the person and our memories of those times.
But regardless of how welcoming you are to such overtures, in this respect, Facebook has turned into one long high school reunion. There are few people out there who haven’t reconnected with at least one person from their past thanks to Facebook.
And when we reconnect, we rehash the years between high school and now and do our best to fill in the gaps on all of our mutual friends we lost track of after high school. If we really do want to reach out to some of those missing persons, Facebook makes that really easy, too.
So my question: Is the high school reunion dead? It seems to me it’s been rendered redundant thanks to Facebook. I’m not going to spend $400 to travel back to Wisconsin to see a bunch of people I can catch up with for free whenever I want. And if I really want to see some of those people again, I’ll just organize a weekend with them and create my own reunion.
Thanks to Facebook, I think there are a lot of class Presidents, Vice Presidents, Secretaries and Treasurers breathing a sigh of relief that they’re no longer needed to coordinate that event.
– My name is Jon Friesch, and I’ve reconnected with nearly everyone from my past with whom I intend to reconnect.
maybe there’s a reason you left all those people in your past in the first place. perhaps you should just keep moving on and search for experiences that enrich your life versus ones you’ve already tried and left behind. been there, done that. the reason you don’t want to spend $400 is because like any other purchase, the experience, reward or pleasure is not worth the investment, whereas with technology it’s essentially free so it doesn’t matter if you’re disappointed.
if they meant that much to you, one would never lose contact with them in the first place, long before facebook and social media. that’s why it’s an abuse and an assault on one’s privacy. but, like most things, if you don’t want to play, stay out of the game.