Hello World!

Isn’t it strange how the social networking tools have totally changed the way we use the Internet? And the changes are really broader than that too, they show themselves in real life. I’m currently using two such services – Facebook and LinkedIn.

Just think about all the information you now know about people that you only know peripherally because of tools like Facebook or Twitter, information that you never would have known before, not even about your closest friends. How is this affecting our daily life and how we relate to the people around us?

I’m sure there are both positive and negative effects coming out of this, some we might not see right away. I started using Facebook a couple of years ago after I attended the 10 year anniversary of my time at Bjerkely Folkehøyskole (which today offers different photo classes, when I was a student there, the courses were different). As I arrived there and met my old class mates, I discovered that most actually had quite good overview of where many of the others that had been there were in their life. How? They were all friends on Facebook.

So this made me want to check this out. I also wanted to hear from those who did not make the anniversary (only 10-15 out of 60 students where there), so I decided to join Facebook. As soon as I was back home from my trip to the East, I created a profile and joined the Facebook group for people who had attended that school that year.

Since then I’ve got a lot of other friends on Facebook, I just passed 100, and they come from different groups of people:

• People I went to Bjerkely with
• Friends from my youth here in Sandnes
• People I studied with
• People I know from church
• People I know from work
• People I went to school with as a child in Gausdal
• Family and Relatives
• Some other friends

Some people fall into more than one of these categories, causing links between the clusters if I map my friends:

My friend map from Nexus