Do my friendships only exist in Cyberspace?

First of all, cheers to Caroline for turning me on to goodreads.com. As she put it, "it's facebook for library nerds." I could spend hours on this site looking at what people are reading, making comments, trying to remember books that I want to read, etc. etc. Go start your own profile and be my friend!

As I just finished browsing around this site and sprucing up my profile, I realized that I am becoming more and more attached to cyber interactions with my friends. I check the blogs of my friends like a maniac, I find myself spiraling through people's myspace pages looking at who knows who, and I live for checking that little map on the right to see how many people come to my blog and where they are. This eventually leads to cyber-envy. How does Jessie always come up with such a cool background on her myspace page? How can I get as many dots on my map as Alex? How come people have better taste in books than I do? See how I just asked you to be my friend on goodreads? I have a pathological need to expand my cyber-circle as much as possible in order to validate myself as a hip, popular, technologically cutting edge type person.

You can see how this becomes dangerous. I always knew that I had an addictive personality. However, this is the height of modern technology isn't it? People staying virtually connected despite being geographically separated. Good and bad I guess. There are the obvious benefits but what happens when I lose my job because of a lack of productivity? Sorry Bossman, no dry cleaning today, I had to update my blog...and no, I didn't pay the bills yet, I had to make up an evite for my cyber book club's first virtual meeting over ichat.