Surprises from the cyber space

Cyber world brought a lot of surprises for me. From the social media, facebook, I came to meet long lost friends. There are friends from my childhood, friends from my adolescent years to those who knew me through my pen writing as we were only pen friends. I have a pen friend whom I've never met in person, and recently we found each other through Facebook.

I love the social media since I can visit my friends at my leisure time. Sad that some friends still do not trust the social media, so they wouldn't join in. For some others, social media is wasting their time. Frankly, it is time consuming! We need to be careful not to fall into an addicted condition. Everything need a balancing partner...time for cyber visit should be balanced with our time to have real visits. Even if we do exist in the cyber space, the in-depth relation will came easier with a real meeting.

Sometimes we have circle of friends. It is somehow surprising to find that some of our old friends (even close friends) is a friend of another good friend. We never know as we don't usually talk about friends outside our mutual circle except if we accidentally meet in events. Or, a childhood friend who was married to a friend I had during my time in the university.

My latest surprise is a bit embarrassing (for a person like me who boasted that I'll never forget a friend). I met a mother of my eldest son's classmate. Her face looked familiar, but I thought that perhaps I've just seen her in several of our parents teachers' meetings. She told me that we came from the same senior high school. Later on we continue our friendship through facebook. She did mention a name from our school days. Later on I found out that she (A) is also writing a blog. She said that she was taught by a friend (I) who now lives in Japan. Again she mentioned the same name, it sounded familiar... but I didn't think that the owner of that name is the same person I'd know.

Apart from that, I also gained friends from my cyber space activities. I made friends from the citizen journalism community, and from the blogging activity. In Facebook we can't make qualification of friends. There is no category of friends. And any friends can take a peek of your friends' status. Off course there is the privacy setting, but to have the network shown out we should let it as it is. People can have the same name or similar name. Without peeking out I won't be sure if those name in my friend's list of friends are the same people whom I knew.

I was wishing Krismariana, my fellow blogger, a birthday wish through Facebook, when my friend "A" commented in a surprised tone: "You know her too?" She insisted that I must know "I".

Browsing through Kris' blog I found the link to I's blog. Her half face picture didn't really familiar to my eyes. Then I came to her page that revealed her childhood story. I was not sure that she is the same person I knew even tough there is an old picture of her and her sisters and brothers. Rolling down to further reading made me jumped from my bed (I was reading on the bed)...I saw my own picture smiling at me. So, she is really the same person I knew! I went down to put my comment without even finishing to read that post.

It turned out that we were sharing the same extra curricular activity in our senior high school days. This fact made me ventured into her facebook profile. To my astonishment, I saw that there is one picture where I posed together with the whole Science group including "I" and "A". Here came my embarrassing moment, so I'm not really that good in memorizing friends.

Wow, it is really a very big surprise! I was not only finding (and remembering) my old schoolmates, but I was also taken into a new networking web of bloggers. I've read comments in Kris' blog, but those comments came from names without faces, and suddenly I found out how close I was with those names.

I knew that cyber space is full of surprising experiences. Being invited to Seoul was the surprising sweet experience, and it also had the negative surprising moments too (one of it was the high internet billings which came unpredictable before I'm using this unlimited IM2 service). I hope that I'll find more positive experiences in the coming years...