We should get out more

My partner thinks I should get out more, go to more speeches, launches and functions. Frankly, I find most of these things a waste of time, but I will turn out on special occasions — friends’ birthdays and such — or to honour someone I respect. Like the recent launch of the Michael Kirby Centre in Melbourne.

I met lots of people I’d never met before, which was nice. I also met some old acquaintances. But I also met quite a few members of a new category of people: friends I didn’t know I knew.

It’s all the fault of social networking. I ‘know’ hundreds of people I’ve never met — in most cases, never even spoken to — thanks to Facebook.  Now I was meeting some of them in the flesh for the first time, and I found it rather disturbing.

We used to meet people in offices, but I’m rarely in an office more than a couple of hours a week now. We used to meet people in bars, but I haven’t ventured into a bar or club, straight or gay, more than a handful of times in the last 10 years.

We used to use the net to keep in touch with friends. That’s fine, because we can fill in the blanks in the online persona from our lived experience of the real person.

But you can’t do it the other way round. You can’t accurately extrapolate a whole person from an online encounter. There’s not enough data. So we use our imagination to fill the gaps. And often, our imagination gets it wrong.

Can we really use the word ‘friend’ of someone we only know online? I don’t think so.

I was on one of my rare outings when a total stranger came up and said, “Hi there, you don’t recognise me, do you, but we’re Facebook friends”.

I racked my brains but couldn’t remember any online interaction.

Instead, what popped into my head was the image of that geek in Glee who blackmails girls for their used panties. And then Mr Facebook said, “So, you gonna jump my bones, or what?”

The thought had never occurred to me. My face must have said it all, because he immediately blushed, and as I struggled to find an appropriate response, he fled.

We could, of course, have worked past the momentary embarrassment. We might even have become real friends. I might have discovered that his resemblance to a fictional panty-sniffer was entirely coincidental.

Instead we behaved as rudely as if we were still online. He probably went straight home and de-friended me. One click and — gone.

Of course, we all know people who met online and went on to form successful relationships. But I’ll bet they had some adjusting to do.

My partner’s right. We should all get out more.