I know this is going to sound a bit strange, considering the amount of time I put into social networking sites, and the amount of energy that I expend actually working with them, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I’ve never been a fan of social networking sites. And it’s not because of reasons you might suspect.

You see, part of the appeal of a social networking site is that you can revisit the past by contacting people you used to know and get reacquainted with them. And that’s great. I’ve run across a lot of people I’ve known over the years, hooked back up with them on social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, and it’s been great. However, there’s been a sinister underbelly to this whole thing as well. And I suspect it’s one of those things that really only affects me more than anyone else. Let me explain.

For years, I have had great relationships with a lot of people, relationships that I have valued greatly. But it’s only through the use of social networking that I began to suspect that quite a few of those relationships were quite one-sided, in that I think I may have been the only one to actually have thought them to be as significant as they really were.

An example: When I was a young kid, I had a friend in fourth or fifth grade who gave me a stuffed animal who has been with me practically my entire life. At the time, that stuffed animal was pretty significant to her, and a friend of mine and I used to play catch with him in class. And at one point, I guess he became even more significant to me because she gave him to me, and I thought that was such a thoughtful gesture. Over the years, I remembered her name, mainly because she gave me that stuffed animal. And that little guy and I have been through a lot together. I went into the Army, and he went in with me. Other soldiers used to call him Lieutenant Elmer, and there was a time when I tossed him out to little kids to play with, as a sort of “get to know us as good people, not just occupiers in green uniforms” and they played with Elmer, throwing him around kind of like my friend and I had done in fourth and fifth grade. Like I said, that little stuffed animal has been with me for nearly forty years, and he’s seen more of the world than most other people ever will. And he may have had a serious impact on the lives of people who experienced his friendly stuffed ways.

But years later, when I made contact with the person who gave me that stuffed animal, her response when I mentioned I still had him nearly floored me. I got the impression she didn’t even remember him. And those memories of the connection that we had back then, shared over that little green frog who has touched so many lives, were forever tainted.

This same phenomenon has radiated also through other relationships I have had as well. There are a number of people I have known through the years who don’t seem to remember our relationships as fondly as I have. So when I went to contact them, after finding them through some search algorithm that Facebook or whatever site I was using used, I realized that they had almost completely different memories of our special times together. In some cases, they didn’t even accept friend requests, which gave me the impression that not only did they think back fondly on our wonderful times together, but they may not have remembered them at all.

Memories are like that, in that not always do both people remember an event the same way. I have a former best friend of mine who I actually went through a lot of work to find again through a social networking site. When I finally found him, it was a ho hum connection, which meant that no matter how fondly I remember our great adventures together, time destroyed the real bonds of friendship. Like Wolfe’s book warns us, sometimes you can’t go home again, no matter how much you long for how great home was at one point in time.

That’s what social networking has shown me, and it hasn’t been the experience I hoped to have. Sometimes, I think it might have been better to keep some of those past relationships in memory where that shared fondness still existed, never to be replaced by the reality that that person I would have done anything to be with a few more seconds longer in that relationship we once shared hasn’t spent one instant thinking about us since we parted ways.