My family has expressly forbidden me from blogging about them, or putting up un-pre-approved pictures of them on my blog, for some odd reason.  Suffice it to say, the wedding was very nice, as weddings are.  Just like there's no such thing as an ugly baby, even Bridezilla is beautiful on her big day.  And every awkward bridegroom is a delight to behold, being led so docilely to his slaughter.  And while we didn't come away from my cousin's wedding with a viral video, they did play "Thriller" at the reception.  It seems to have become a standard. 

It was nice being with the family and away from the internet for a few days while I was in DC, I have to tell you.  Seeing as the first U.S. residential treatment center for Internet addiction opened this summer, I was relieved I seemed to be perfectly OK without it. I didn't have any withdrawal symptoms, although I could've done with a little porn come Monday morning.  I got by with a mental greatest hits montage that ended with a rousing replay of a session with an incredibly hot Dominican I had a little fling with a couple months ago (and yes, I consider it a fling if you grab a burger together afterward). 


I usually don't have any trouble being away from the computer, but if it's sitting right there, why not?  I picked up a USA Today at the hotel buffet Monday morning, and there was an interesting article about "flocking" — how, according to the authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, "so many things we normally think of as individualistic — like what our body size is, or what we think about a political topic, or whether we are happy — are actually collective phenomena." 

Apparently social networking is stripping us of our own delusions of grandeur.  We aren't even a herd anymore.  We're a flock.  I mean, what comes in flocks?  Sheep, goats, birds.  Whether such animals have friends is the next big question social scientists looking at networking have to answer.

"The perception is you have a lot more friends than you used to," the article quotes sociologist Duncan Watts at Yahoo! Research as saying. "All these not-real friends you have on Facebook — you had them before, you just didn't count them.  A lot of this is the measurement effect. We can measure things we couldn't measure before, and that changes our perception."

Hmm.  This sounds suspiciously like the science of penis measuring.  It all depends on where you measure from.  And like penis measurements, when you've got the real thing in front of you, the virtual stats always seem — how can I put it? — a little inflated.

Of course we could measure before the internet came along, we just had to be a little less delusional about it, is all.  For me, the measure of a friend has always been fairly simple math.  It's someone you can call when you land in jail, who'll front your bail.  Period.  And that's about as quantifiable as it gets.  Trust me.

The internet is not for friends, it's for fuckbuddies.  The internet is a fuckbuddy, in fact.  And, honestly, the fuckbuddy relationship hasn't gotten the social scientific scrutiny it deserves.  We're all "friend" this and "friend" that, but it's no wonder people are depressed when you have 569 "friends" and none of them will fuck you.  

Which is why professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon Robert Kraut's findings make perfect sense.  In research published last year in Communication & Society, he found that

those who used the Internet to meet people online more than to communicate with friends and family increased their depression and feelings of isolation. But research has shown that most people communicate online with someone they already know — and those who did that actually reduced depression, the study found.

Because we already know no one we already know will sleep with us.  But there's always a glimmer of hope someone we don't will.  And hope, as the sages have always known (and the nation is coming to discover) is sweet on the outside but bitter at the core.   Good thing then that friendships aren't based on hope.  Like family, they're based on fate.

But due to prior agreements with certain parties who shall remain nameless, I am not permitted to go into that in my blog.