Random closeness.

Much is made about the cause and affect, social media has, from a societal aspect of forming tribes, giving everyone a voice and making the world a smaller place and enabling people who have lost touch to reconnect. It would be rare to find someone using Facebook et al, who has not used social media to track down long lost friends, acquaintances and colleagues, or conversely, who have not been tracked down by someone from their past. Those initial contacts bring with them anxiety about the initial contact, wry smiles built around the nostalgia of good times past, a history shared, a slice of time when things were different, you were younger and life seemed simpler. The amazement and excitement of finding someone thought lost from your past brings with it questions of what to do next, are they still the same person, do they still like Kiss or have they moved on beyond the bond that bound you?

That aura, that warm and fuzzy feeling, that excitement and angst built around affinity for place and time associated with that person, can quickly fade. It fades for all kinds of reasons, nothing in common beyond a quick catch up on times past, you were already moving apart all those years ago and sometimes they just don't reply to your posting.
This particular trend of random closeness is often just that, random, capricious, haphazard, meaningless without substance of a long term relationship. It's that substance in relationships that bind, it's the fabric, the meaningfulness and soul in relationships that is the connective tissue and that is hard to maintain over a wifi signal with someone just found for curiosity's sake, not living in your city or country without the opportunity to connect in the flesh.

Much is written about the power of the net bringing the world closer through connections beyond immediate circles but more often than not, those connections are not meaningful, just dots in a line, not relationships and we should not confuse the two. Random closeness, like random acts of kindness brings with it a feeling of geniality but like random acts of fitness, is useless unless taken up with commitment for long term fraternity. Random closeness is like the school reunion built on curiosity of what people look like now and bench marking achievements and accomplishments against what was envisaged for the future.

To engage in random closeness to build up social numbers is akin to wanting celebrity, which is all about being loved by a lot of people from a distance. How do you know who the real friends are without looking them in the eye and pressing the flesh. All of this seems to be backed up by numbers garnered over the last 12 months with sites such as Facebook losing popularity in 14 of the 23 countries where it has a 50% penetration. There will be competitors vying for your attention and Google will be at the forefront looking to bring your circle of friends to another platform but the underlying issue of having close friends and then random closeness through a collection strategy will consign sites to a shallow accord long term.