Honey They Orkutted Me!

To be or not to be in the social networks is left to the choice of the individual. Still people are involved in hot debates over the sanity of these groups of netizens. My Space, Orkut, Facebook and so many other networks are making waves with the number of subscribers multiplying every minute. Is this for good, or are they just antisocial networks?

I was extremely skeptical regarding social networking. Why can't people e-mail if at all they needed to correspond? Or they can chat if it is so urgent. What is the need for a group where hundreds of people log in each day just to tell hi and ask for each other's profile? Evils like child pornography have emerged, putting the cyber criminologists in a state of despair. What is the point in showing all your scraps to all the people? What the hell happened to privacy?

I'm not that pessimistic. Why don't try something constructively. If so many people have been involved in such an enterprise, there ought to be something good in it, making people come back to it again and again, making more people to join the band.

I hit the name of my school. Wow! There has been a community dedicated to my alma mater. Discussions regarding who the best teacher was, what is the best place you liked to be in our campus, and so on were going on. There were even threads to unite the batches of every academic year so that people can get back to their classmates!

To my surprise, I could view the profiles of some of my classmates. Premel Patter, the French guy, Olive Kevin, who used to inform the class teacher that I didn't complete my homework exercises, Jabir, who was rich but humble guy, and many others. With little hope, I sent a scrap to each one of them. Most of them replied. God! We went back in time, sharing the past moments! Thanks to social networking.