I was talking to a friend who was couchsurfing in my place these days. She said she doesn’t like Skype, because since it is mostly free for the caller/callee, there is this semi-obligation to talk to the other party, all the time, for a long time. According to her, phone calls and letters cost money and effort, and so the communication becomes less forced, and more important. She has similar dislikes for e-mail.

I don’t think I fully agree with her regarding Skype and E-mail, but for some points I see where she is coming from. Myself, I have been noticing something similar in the social network Facebook. I started my account on facebook a few months ago, and my inicial idea was to have it as an outlet to messages to my day to day flesh friends here in Japan. While at first I resisted a little bit, eventually though, many people whom I have only a passing acquitance to made it to my contact list. While there are positive points of having a wide variety of people in your social network, it does change the way I see the network, and how I interact with it.

Mixi has adressed this issue a bit – you can set “levels” of friends, and set up certain information to only show up to certain levels of people in your network. But thanks to social engineering, I wonder how effective this would actually be. All you need is one “friend”, who is closer to someone you don’t really want hearing your rants than she is to you, for her to quickly spill the beans to your “friend”, and hell break loose again.

I know, there is no expectation of privacy in the internet, but that does not prevent me from lamenting it.

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On another, and lighter note, today I saw “Whisper from the heart” “Mimi wo sumaseba” again. That is a small and simple movie that always strike a deep chord into me. Every time I see it, I find out new things, like a good old book, and I also feel myself reflecting about what I want in my life, and how can I get to it. This seems an appropriate moment to do so.