Social Networking Oddities

On a lazy, wet, gloomy Saturday morning, I wake up like any normal, email-obsessed, "take away my caffeine but please leave me my internet and my access to email 'cause otherwise I don't know what I would do every 5 minutes", young adult.

Wading through the obstacle course of overambitiously self-subscribed, non-spam "newsletters", "word of the day", "thought of the day", "Amazon.com offers", "Borders online coupons", I finally reach an email from orkut.

The mail has a link to a message in the social networking site Orkut where there is a "scrap" waiting for me. If I hadn't already known what that meant I would have considered what one does to scrap, trash it.

An Orkut Scrap: A message sent by a friend to you but for all to see.

Trust me on this, the curious george that I am, I no longer have to creepily, secretly peek at someone else's messages. I can go read it on Orkut scraps and get to know what's going on in that person's private life without any guilt. Call me Mr. Too-much-time-on-his-hands, but why would I let go of such a gratifying almost cathartic experience ?

Now I may not be anymore the teenager sitting on the bleeding edge, always wanting to keep up with the latest trends to be cool guy, but I sure as heck am a wannabe none the less, and yet this new generation phenomenon of scrapping escapes me.

I understand calling on the phone is definitely ancient and well......social, but who wants to keep in touch without enjoying the pleasure of punching some keys on a computer keyboard first. There is email and instant messaging but those were obvioulsy not enough. I guess they were too private to have a uggh... private conversation.

An early 20's twit once elucidated me on my ignorance that scrapping fits right between email and instant messaging.
By trying to wiggle its way between those two modes, which by the way my parents are still getting used to, I can only wonder if this is another desperate ploy to fill the increasing abyss of decreasing social skills that the attention-hungry tech-age, starved of some real human interaction has dug out for its netizens, by providing a forum to have a private conversation in the public domain.