I consider myself a pretty friendly person. I go out, occasionally, when the sun has disappeared behind the mountains and the magic trolls have gone to sleep. I hang out with my friends, I imbibe some alcoholic beverages, I run around with no pants on, etc and so on. In this sense, real life is quite easy. A friend is a singular being, a carbon-based bipedal life form who exists on foods and liquids in order to maintain its current state of aliveness. It may sound complex, but luckily our brains have, for thousands of years, been evolving to this state, a state of mutual cohabitation. Computers wish they had our brain power, for we have the ability to enter a social situation and “figure things out,” whether it be between one person or between a group of people. This is truly an extraordinary event, and while it is maintained in a primitive sense by our animal brethren, we truly are the only beings on the planet who have a mastery of such social situations.

And then a thing like the internet comes along and fucks everything up.

Social gatherings on the internet have essentially destroyed social gatherings in the real world, primarily because it’s easier, and safer, and also because a lot more people can be involved with people they never would’ve been involved with in the first place. Behind a textual mask, the rubbery-faced 16-year-old boy can schmooze with the ridiculously attractive 23-year-old woman and no one will question how, or why, this happened. When stripped of our visual and aural senses, we are left with only what we type, and that is a sense that I feel we have not understood yet.

But this isn’t really a dissertation on the sociology and psychology of internet society, it’s a question. If I befriend someone on Myspace, should I also friend them on Facebook? People have now becomes faceted, and not in that fun human way, no, now we are broken by social internet coteries, the foundations of which make little to no sense. In the real world, cliques are clearly established, so much so that they are almost universal. American cliques, for instance, are easily recognized here, but also have enough truth in them to be recognized across the world. When I say someone is a “jock,” a very clear image enters the head, of letterman’s jackets and rugged good looks, captains of the football team and all that.

Again, on the internet this is demolished. Cliques are founded primarily by website — are you a MySpace person, or do you prefer Friendster? Do you frequent Facebook because you have a lot of college friends, or are you into Purevolume because of it’s music scene?

As you can already tell, these cliques quickly become something else, as the websites themselves turn into specialty sites in their own right. I won’t go into each site and it’s clique, partially because they’re all stereotypes that are demeaning to the sites themselves, and partially because it will probably be wrong to you, since everyone has their own view of what each website represents.

So I wonder, when people join various friend-related websites, if they are creating separate personalities for each site. Is the person you friend on Myspace the same person on Facebook? Yes, in real life. But on the internet, where everyone is essentially a glorified version of themselves, you have the ability to put a certain type of you on Myspace, and another type on Facebook. On LiveJournal you can express your deepest desires, while on Friendster you can be light and jovial, and each incarnation is not really you, but you as you’d like to be.

Even LiveJournal isn’t you, despite being a journal, simply because people are reading what you write. So you spend extra time spellchecking and making sure your friends clearly understand what your journal entry is about. Diaries don’t work like that, they thrive on poor spelling and grammar, of spontaneous tangents midsentence, of words darkened by pushing your pen on the paper, of doodles and crushes and heartbreaks. Things that can be written on LiveJournal, but aren’t really there.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read many LJ entries that hit me right in the gut, and I’ve written some, too, but it’s never the same. It’s like, when you’re alone in your house, really alone. This is when you dance the silliest dances, shout the dumbest things, make faces in the mirror, walk around naked. But as soon as one person is even in the vicinity, you’re done. Pants are on, mouth is closed, and your free-wheeling dances are saved for another day alone.

So what does this all mean? In part, it means that the internet is a lifeless extension of life, where words become more powerful than actions, and that’s frightening in a sense, because actions are the only thing by which a person can be judged. It also means that a person might friend you on Facebook but not on Myspace because they’re a different person there. The internet persona is nothing more than our id come out to play. It’s our super-us, the person we see when we close our eyes and visualize ourselves. Very different from our real us, who looks in a mirror and counts our flaws.

I don’t know the answer to the question I presented in the title of this long and rambling entry. I feel weird friending one person on multiple sites. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. I feel bad if I don’t do it for some people, and for others it makes no difference. I have friends on Myspace that I wouldn’t consider friends, yet I don’t want to unfriend them because I feel bad. The internet dissolves truth like that.

I find internet culture fascinating, especially our American internet culture. America, as a country, is sorely lacking in its own traditions and its own culture (really, the only traditions we have that are truly our own and not from England/Europe are 4th of July and Thanksgiving). The internet is more than making up for that, creating a lot of traditions and a lot of culture, but really, it means nothing, and while we languish in our caricatured internet life, we are sucking away our real life.

I guess that’s the point I wanted to make.