“I don’t understand why these people send me cards, I mean they never call, and I haven’t talked with them in years.”
I heard this from a middle aged man decrying the cost of postage, mystified because people he barely knew or hadn’t spoken to in years saw fit to send him a yearly Christmas card.
I instantly understood why mere acquaintances send Christmas cards, because I’m on myspace. In the world of myspace, people maintain a myspace page for many of the same reasons that people used to send Christmas cards. Most of the “friends” on a given myspace page are made up of people who haven’t seen the poster since high school, just like most of the people who exchanged cards when it was more in vogue.
The main reason people send out those cards to near-strangers, is that you can keep in touch with people without the effort of actual day-to-day friendship. You can measure your life against theirs, based on a Christmas card stock, a family Christmas letter and family picture. Likewise, on myspace, people can measure themselves against others based on friend count, the picture galleries and how pimped out the page is.
Christmas card fanatics, who send out hordes of cards, know that people feel the need to respond in kind. That means card fanatics will have plenty of cards to display around their house, proving to visitors that they have lots of “friends.” In the same way, a myspace extremist can have two thousand “friends” that they display every time someone comes to visit.
Sending out Christmas cards is also a way of displaying yourself in a way you can control. In day-to-day life, people can’t control how they are perceived, but on a card things are different. You can pose a family worthy of Jerry Springer in matching button-downs on a windswept beach. On your myspace page, you can also project whatever image you would like, choosing a background color or picture as a way to present yourself to the world. If you’ve gotten fat, just put up a picture of your cat or a picture of yourself ten pounds lighter. Most of your “friends” will never know.
Everyone talks about how computers have caused us to retreat from the world, substituting superficial interaction for real human interaction. In the past we were forced to use things like the mail system to maintain this superficial interaction, doing things like actually licking stamps and addressing envelopes to keep in touch. These days we’ve just amped it up, because humans tend to develop systems that make whatever it is they already do more effortless. So it isn’t that we only just discovered superficial interaction: we just do it faster and better than we used to.
I heard this from a middle aged man decrying the cost of postage, mystified because people he barely knew or hadn’t spoken to in years saw fit to send him a yearly Christmas card.
I instantly understood why mere acquaintances send Christmas cards, because I’m on myspace. In the world of myspace, people maintain a myspace page for many of the same reasons that people used to send Christmas cards. Most of the “friends” on a given myspace page are made up of people who haven’t seen the poster since high school, just like most of the people who exchanged cards when it was more in vogue.
The main reason people send out those cards to near-strangers, is that you can keep in touch with people without the effort of actual day-to-day friendship. You can measure your life against theirs, based on a Christmas card stock, a family Christmas letter and family picture. Likewise, on myspace, people can measure themselves against others based on friend count, the picture galleries and how pimped out the page is.
Christmas card fanatics, who send out hordes of cards, know that people feel the need to respond in kind. That means card fanatics will have plenty of cards to display around their house, proving to visitors that they have lots of “friends.” In the same way, a myspace extremist can have two thousand “friends” that they display every time someone comes to visit.
Sending out Christmas cards is also a way of displaying yourself in a way you can control. In day-to-day life, people can’t control how they are perceived, but on a card things are different. You can pose a family worthy of Jerry Springer in matching button-downs on a windswept beach. On your myspace page, you can also project whatever image you would like, choosing a background color or picture as a way to present yourself to the world. If you’ve gotten fat, just put up a picture of your cat or a picture of yourself ten pounds lighter. Most of your “friends” will never know.
Everyone talks about how computers have caused us to retreat from the world, substituting superficial interaction for real human interaction. In the past we were forced to use things like the mail system to maintain this superficial interaction, doing things like actually licking stamps and addressing envelopes to keep in touch. These days we’ve just amped it up, because humans tend to develop systems that make whatever it is they already do more effortless. So it isn’t that we only just discovered superficial interaction: we just do it faster and better than we used to.
