28 July 2008 Open Letter
Dear Old Friend,
Thank you so much for your invitation to join Social Networking Site X (SNSX). I am touched that, although we haven’t spoken or written in years, you have refrained from erasing my email address and thereby extended this digital hand of friendship to me along with likely hundreds of others. (Tell them I said hi, by the way.)
I recognize that the invitation to join you at SNSX represents a delightful optimism on your part, a hope that the nonzero probability that that you and I might wish to resume our relationship at some time in the future might be sustained and even nurtured by the beneficent hand of SNSX.
Alas, I must decline your invitation. Do not take it personally.
In my old age I find myself becoming ever more the grouchy hermit, and I am no longer able to hold onto the youthful, exuberant ideals embodied by your invitation to perpetual contact. No, cold and heartless as I am, I find myself subscribing to a more organic, Darwinian model of friendship, ie those that are worthy of persisting do so without the technological assistance of SNSX and its brethren, while the rest are more than welcome to settle into the warm ooze of my longterm memory.
In other words, Old Friend, whose memory I will always cherish, if we need SNSX to stay in touch, then, well, perhaps we shouldn’t.
3 comments in “Open Letter”
July 29th, 2008 at 12:05 am
This made me laugh out loud — partly because of the way it’s written, and partly becuase I just know how true it is. :)
July 29th, 2008 at 1:15 am
Okay, I get the picture. Geez, simple “no” would have sufficed.
August 9th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I, your old, out of touch mom, do not know what SNSX is, but I thought it was a great letter.