The social networking age...

Being a pseudo-techie I'm interested in some of the aspects of social networking today. Given that I met my fiance online, I'm definitely a fan of meeting friends online. I've re-connected with friends from high school and college on networking sites (like LinkedIn). But I didn't expect to reconnect with family on there.

For more complicated reasons than I'm going to go into here (and out of respect for my family), let me just say that things went awry in the family several years ago. At that time two sides of the family pretty much ceased speaking. Although I don't necessarily disagree with the decision, the unfortunate part was that my sister and I lost our relationships with our cousins.

Fast forward a few years. In the past few days, our cousins have found us through MySpace. I'm not a huge fan of MySpace, nor do I spend a lot of time on there, but the experience has reminded me that today's technological culture actually does create real opportunities for people to connect and reconnect. It's been really interesting to catch up with my cousins, learn about what they're doing these days and what kind of people they have become. Since most of us live in Southern California now, I think we're going to try and meet up sometime this summer. I don't know if we'll be great friends, but it's really nice that now we have that chance.