Let me start out by saying HAPPY NEW YEAR! I don’t know how 2007 was for y’all, but it was only so-so for me, so I am welcoming 2008 with open arms and a great sense of optimism and hope for another fabulous year in the life of Allie. I hope y’all have an amazing, happy, healthy, and exciting 2008!
Moving on, I have to vent about something. I started my MySpace account about two and a half years ago to keep in touch with my oldest friend, Denise. I’m not the biggest MySpace user; I check it (and use it) less frequently than Facebook, but when I get bored, it’s nice to have. Since opening an account with them, I haven’t had too many random people message me. I get the occasional spam comment or message, but those are easy to delete. I’ve always been cautious with my profile information, and when MySpace made it possible to make profiles of all ages private, I immediately changed my privacy settings so no one but my friends could see my profile.
However, in the month of December, I received four random messages. The first two came from a thirty-five-year-old teacher and coach from Sikeston, Missouri. It was the same message — a simple, “Hello, how are you?” The second one, this time from a twenty-year-old in Little Rock, Arkansas, was a little less simple: “Hi, I am ___. I was wondering if you would like to chat some time.” The third one came from a twenty-two-year-old from Jackson, and like the first one, was just, “Hi, what’s up?” All of these messages are completely innocuous, but what bothers me is the minimal amount of information that is displayed to any of my non-friends. If you were a thirty-five-year-old teacher and coach, what would make you think it’s okay to message someone who is fourteen years younger than you? That’s quite an age difference. And really kind of creepy, especially ’cause you don’t know me. And that age difference? Is probably around the age of one of your students.
I guess it doesn’t make sense to me to attempt to contact people I have never met because, for me, the sole purpose for creating a MySpace page was to keep in contact with one of my best friends and later, to keep up with my friends over the summer because our school didn’t have Facebook then. (That’s right; you used to have to wait for your school to be added to Facebook to join!) It’s convenient for checking in on my friends and seeing what my favorite bands and singers are up to (and finding new favorite bands and singers). Other than that, I have no need for it. If I want to meet someone, I’m going to meet him or her in a real place, in the real world. For all the good social networks like MySpace and Facebook have done for keeping in touch with your nearest and dearest from seventy years ago, it’s not a substitute for real life. I guess I just want to keep MySpace and Facebook for the people I really know, and lately, that seems to be asking too much.
When I was a senior in college, I was thinking about attending Winthrop University. I had it listed as one of my interests on my LiveJournal page, and a girl who was currently attending Winthrop left a comment on one of my public entries. She and I left the occasional comment on each other’s entries and are friends on Facebook. Over the summer, a girl came across my LiveJournal and noticed that she and I had similar interests in movies; she added me as a friend, and I added her back; no big deal. If you can see that we have something in common, I am a-okay with you wanting to be my cyber friend. But if you can’t see my profile, if you can’t see that my all time favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz or that I love Ingram Hill and Josh Kelley and the color purple, if you don’t know that my sorority sisters are my best friends and mean the world to me, if all you know is that I’m a twenty-one-year-old girl named Allie who lives in Jackson, Tennessee, why would you send me a private message asking me to chat with you?
I love meeting new people. Like, in real life. And I love knowing that there are people who wander over to my blog every day. (And I’d love for y’all to leave comments — hint, hint.) And I’d love to be friends with every blogger whose blog I read because we have something in common, even if it is only that we’re girls who blog. However, I’m not big on random strangers thinking they should message me because of the tiny, tiny, completely insignificant amount of information they’ve ascertained from my private profile page. At least with a blog, you get a feeling of who the writer is. I can pretty much guarantee that you don’t know who I am by knowing that I’m twenty-one. And I can pretty much guarantee that if you have an idea of what a twenty-one-year-old girl is, that’s probably not who I am.
Moral of the Longest Blog Ever: If you don’t know me and want to be my friend on MySpace, don’t hold your breath. I’d probably talk to you in real life, but don’t waste your time trying to talk to me over MySpace. Grow up, move on, and talk to someone in the real world. It’s much better face-to-face. If you don’t know me and have stumbled across this blog, feel free to leave a comment and say hello. You kind of get an idea of who I am, and I’m obviously leaving this open for the whole world to read, so have at it. Just don’t try to add me on MySpace yet.
