Counting the incompleteness of the self
In the past days, a statistical wave went over me, and I started to count the people I know. That is, indexing the people on my business mobile phone, my personal one, LinkedIn, FaceBook, Xing, YMessenger etc. The conclusion is that I have personally met and randomly stayed in contact with around 850 people. Out of these, it is less than 20 that I have talked to face to face in the past month, less than 10 who are close to me on a personal level and less than 5 that I would wake up in the middle of the night for.
That is some scary statistics. But then again, incompleteness of the self demands for completion through others :)
PS: Last evening on the streets of Bucharest there were some ladies cleaning the streets, probably gipsies. Brooming and stuff. One of them had stopped working and was writing an SMS.
We got it together didn't we
We definitely got our thing together don't we baby
Isn't that nice
I mean really, when you really sit and think about it
Isn't it really, really nice
I could easily feel myself slipping more and more away to
That simple world of my own
Nobody but you and me
We got it together baby
(Barry White, My First, My Last, My Everything)
2 comments:
I know hat it might sound nice to think of yourself as really having 800+ "contacts" but the reality of it is that this are not unique contacts.
I estimate that most of them are duplicated over the most networks that you access and so the real number of people is more somewhere around ~150 or so.
The again this is irrelevant too, as like most things in life, most of the people you know are just another for of noise that hold a bit of information.
In a way, the only thing that masters are the people that you actually care about. And luckily , to do that you do not need to see them very ofter. At least not all of them :D
I thought so myself, but the number is "cleansed", that is, I have eliminated all duplicate names. Thinking that I might have still missed some, I have further subtracted some numbers. All in all, I think the number is quite accurate :-)
Point is, regardless of the quantity and the narcissistic considerations regarding people encountered, the fascinating thing is the expansion of the social networks and the minimal extent to which we really maintain contact with the people who matter to us. It is mostly non-Web2.0 instruments, as you just pointed out (phoning, lunching etc) - but it is more rarely encountered.
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