Plenty has already been said about the ease of keeping in touch these days. We all carry our phones around with us, and have email, texting, and Facebook. Some have webcams, some use internet forums and message boards as well.
But you also get to look back in time, which is a bit alarming. Back to people you knew 10 or 15 years ago, but that have gone another direction in life. This chick in the UK decided to look all hers up with almost uniformly unimpressive results. Granted, she was apparently a raging alcoholic for most of her life, but it again raises the question: is such easy access to our past good, bad, or ultimately trivial?
It's not just exes that make this question relevant, though that's where the line becomes blurred. Looking up old friends, after all, would seem to be relatively harmless. Maybe you stopped being friends for a reason; maybe it was just distance or time or circumstance.
Looking up exes, on the other hand... that's where the question becomes interesting. Is it healthy? Is it a Really Big Deal, or is it about as nostalgically momentous as catching a rerun of Diff'rent Strokes?
For the longest time, one of them remained a mystery. Armed with an un-Googleable name (akin to "Jane Doe") and an 8-year head start, I had resigned myself to being perpetually curious. Then came Facebook, and "People you may know", and that mystery is completely resolved. It's a rather anticlimactic end, and while I can honestly say I was glad to hear from her and to see she is doing well, it makes me wonder if some things are better left unknown. Is there a benefit to not knowing?
Is it better to leave such things in the murky past? Absent some sort of prior abusive relationship, are such re-connections wise, foolish, or simply innocuous bits of nostalgia?
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