by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: October 07, 2010

We will always host a healthy curiosity about the outcomes in life for our grade school, high school and college. We are even capable of remembering classmates from training programs and shorter term educational events and wanting to know how they are doing.

From the schoolyard bully or mortal social enemy to the kid who always was a treat to see every day, we have a healthy and natural need to know where they are and how they are doing.

But social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have encouraged too many ways to cause trouble through polar opposites of privacy. The vast majority are led into an open and unprotected world, then pressured or misled in many ways to reveal far too much about themselves, their locations and their families and friends.

From the other direction these sites allow too much anonymity and false persona, creating conditions that are perfect for the on line equivalent of social voyeurism, spying, invading privacy or even stalking of people from the past. These are not healthy mechanisms and they can very easily get out of control.

Even though we were young or very young when we interacted with our classmates, we went through profound experiences and traumas that formed us as we are today. These are not formative or experiential events that are to be minimized or taken lightly because of youth and lack of development at the time. It is very easy for a past love to turn into an obsession. It is very easy for the trauma of being bullied to trigger a desire to retaliate or to show off to all how well we are doing.  

From the other side, it is equally very easy for a bully who turned into a sociopath or a criminal to find that an old target is now making him or herself available again. It is easy for a love interest who never really had character or integrity to find that an old victim is now available for another round of unhealthy romantic games.

In the middle, it is a treat to reacquaint ourselves with classmates who were a pleasant part of our lives, but who were not personally or emotionally close enough for a complete relationship to establish. If that were the case, we would have moved sun, moon and earth to stay in touch throughout the years.

In real life, parents, the wider circle of friends and other people serve as anchors who keep webs of information about school acquaintances and friends active and alive. When we leave our hometowns, never to return or to interact with anyone, that is for a reason and that reason is usually either for our well being after bad experiences, or is because we are not built with any affection for the place.

The bottom line is that maintaining a well protected MySpace or Facebook account, exercising caution and restraint when finding old classmates, and not instantly diving in to a full pool of relationship issues can lead to some interesting and enjoyable reunions. In the worst cases, we can at least gain some fuller and wiser understandings of the people who occupied most of our day for several years of our lives. 

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