I’ve been home for a little less than a week now. Tomorrow I move out of my house and into a trailer for the rest of the summer. I’m going to be working on a farm in Sedro-Woolley as a strange amalgamation between a marketing intern and a farmhand. It’s going to be an experiment and an adventure in more than a few ways.
Really, it’s a bit like the “foreign exchange student” bit. I’m going to be in a place I’ve never been, working for people I’ve never met, doing things that I’ve never done. I don’t want to sit in my little trailer all day. I want to meet people. I want to become invested in a community and become rooted there.
While catching a viewing of Robin Hood, there was a strange ad that popped up in the previews – Facebook’s “KIN” campaign.
The tagline is provocative enough: “Are we really friends with our friends?” In order to find out the answer to this question, however, they found a nice girl – Rosa – and gave her a new phone and a corporate sponsorship in order to find out. The subsequent videos – with thinly veiled plugs for the KIN phone and Facebook itself – seem to answer the question in a roundabout way. Yes. You can become friends through Facebook … not just reconnect or keep old ones.
Apparently, however, it really helps to have a KIN phone, a camera, and the monetary means in order to do so.
This whole campaign just seems a bit backwards. Facebook and social media – even the idea of the internet – is not so much a mechanism for finding friends as it is for the construction of possible friendships. It seems like there is too much posturing and presenting for it to actually work out … unless one has greater means and the time to ensure that one’s friends are “really” one’s friends. As in, can a Facebook friendship become an actual friendship? Yes. It seems so. It just requires meeting that person and interacting with them face to face.
Sometimes, that simply isn’t possible. So, I guess the point that ties these ramblings together is simple: farming and facebook require you to meet people in order to become friends … and that’s exactly what I intend to do. (/|\)