Virtual Homeroom

Given that I have been on Facebook for probably five years now it is pretty amazing to see how it has impacted my life. To be honest I am not a very active user. Sure when I started I took full advantage of Facebook chat and games of Scrabulous (which was Words with Friends for people who lacked words or, uh, friends) and would regularly update my status. Now, other than the occasional status containing a really bad pun I now am more of a Facebook lurker than anything else. Kim still feels I waste too much time on it but there is an aspect to it that I find fascinating. Facebook has resulted in everyone having a Virtual Homeroom.


Look at your Facebook friends and see how many of them are from grade school or high school. Given that I switched grade schools when I was ten I literally have Facebook friends who I have not seen or spoken to in thirty years yet I get regular updates on their life. Every morning I check the news feed and I listen to the background chatter of people who I knew but don’t really know. To be honest this is exactly what high school was like for me. I knew everyone in the room but I’m not sure if I really had a clue what any of them were about.

Yet homeroom in high school plays a huge role in your life and I swear to this day that I have dreams relating to high school and homeroom. It was where you heard the daily gossip and complaints and news of the day. Nothing really happened but you saw the cliques form and alliances dissolve and friendships and relationships morph daily. It was a place where a group of people gathered for fifteen minutes a day for no reason other than circumstance brought them together.

When I first started thinking about this I started to wonder if it would be good if you had homeroom throughout your entire life. Imagine every workday you met in a room with people, some of whom you would never see again that day, and hear the daily announcements and get the updates on the day. I guess we would now host it in a Starbucks as I couldn’t see surviving that atmosphere without coffee but I started to envision what it would be like to just have that daily gathering. Over time as people moved about they would switch homerooms and others would join in just like when you had the new kid in school. The daily drama of homeroom would play out throughout adulthood. I still don’t know if that would be a good thing or not.

But the more I thought about it the more I realized that is entirely what Facebook is. There is no substance there. You can state your political opinions or your theoretically funny shared greeting cards or spam game requests but for the most part none of it actually matters. It is just a spattering of gossip and clans and complaints about life. It really is the same as homeroom and it is now permanent. You can’t escape the people you happened to meet when you were nine years old. They now follow you for the rest of your life. It scares me as to how this will affect kids today. I know I spent a good portion of high school wanting to just get beyond this incredibly awkward point of my life. Now you never get to leave.

Wednesday Night Music Club: I am not sure which of the old blog standards are going to survive into this new format but this one probably will. Besides, I would have to share this performance by Beth Orton with everyone anyway. This is her song Magpie off of her latest album (CD? iTunes release? What the hell do we call new music now?) When I first saw this I was just floored. Something about repeating the line “What a lie looks like” with that slightly flawed voice of hers just stopped me in my tracks.