I'm just going to start typing

Okay, so I'm not really sure what point I'm going to make with this, but I feel that there is one, so I'm just going to type pretty much as fast as I can and see what comes out (other than typos). And if any of you can think of a good point to add to this, then please be my guests.

Anyway, I was up in Petaluma, north of San Francisco over the Thanksgiving break, spending some time with my aunt. She's a screenwriter/story consultant, who just got out of a couple-year-long gig with a public access television station up there. She's trying to start up projects and whatnot and has decided that mySpace is the way to do it. Her being of my parents' generation, she is not as familiar with recent technological advances, and enlisted me as her mySpace tutor for an afternoon.

Now, as many of you know, facebook is a far superior network for those of us with access to it. Thus, I'm on facebook two or three times a day, and mySpace two or three times a semester. So I wasn't exactly the ideal person for such a tutorial. However, I soon realized that I wasn't really teaching her the ins and outs of mySpace, but more the concept of digital networking. For example, I showed her how to add friends, and post comments on their wall, and she would reply, "But where does the networking come in?" So then I would explain groups that you could join/form, accessing contacts as friends of friends, setting up your former schools and companies in order to meet up with your old co-workers/classmates. After a little while, she acknowledged, "This is an incredible tool." For me, it was like seeing social networking for the first time, because I really had to break it down to the basics.

One thing then that we soon realized, was that many of her older friends involved in independent film companies were not on mySpace, and especially not the ones who were involved with more mainstream activities. They simply had no need to utilize the website. This rendered the site useless to my aunt when trying to contact people in that area of expertise. And we almost immediately saw the limitations of the medium. My aunt can be friends now with Filmmaker Magazine (where she knows no one individually) but not Zeitgeist Films (run by her close friend). MySpace could only take her so far.

The other preoccupation that she had with the site was the need for her to appear professional on it, and distance herself from those who were using the site for purely social networking. I showed her the sites of other self-employed professionals I know who use their sites for both social and professional purposes, but my aunt insisted that she had to make it clear on her page that it was entirely business-oriented. I'm sure that someone could do an entire thesis on the psychology of things like mySpace (is someone doing that?) and how people choose to represent themselves. I told her as we were saying goodbye that I'd leave her a message on her new page, and she reminded me not to let it sound too casual. Whereas I feel like our age group has no problem blurring the lines between professional and personal (or at least fewer problems) than someone in an older generation. I don't know if anyone else has seen things like this with their family members or other people they've interacted with. Or if you have any more thoughts to tie all these observations together, but it was a pretty striking experience for me. And I'm glad to be back to the World of Facebook.