Dub qawwalli and minding people business on Facebook...

A man called 6'o clock one morning and said he had my number written down - he was not sure why. As we chatted, he said "oh yes, you are on FB.. I took down your contact details"

Another man started chatting with me on FB  thinking I was a nice hot woman.  I referred him to my photos if he so sure he in love with me, he started saying he gun find me and kill me and so on because he and his friends like to beat up "faggots".


I joined up Facebook on a whim in 2008 and I have been hooked . I can live without it but life would not have been the same without it. I haven't seen the film as yet.

Friends
Of the 800 friends or so I have on FB, I do not know 75% of them- which is I guess is like in real life where I have hugged up and kissed people who name I do not know or who I forgot where we met.. but is nice to connect anyway. Better that than we kiss rather than we cuss up each other.

  I keep my friends list open since I believe in freedom of association - so I have  members of parliament, pandits, plenty youth leaders, women's activists,  gay rights activists, gay wrongs activists, journalists, computer geeks and sex workers and others who do not have too much information in their profiles. And they know who each other are (even if I don't know who they are but some of them have nice information to share).

I have nervously added relatives (some of them don't speak to each other in real life or unreal life). I have 'unfriended' one man who lied to me in a conversation; and another man who wanted someone to talk to and when that passed, it was a way of freeing up the obligation to keep up a communication.

Lots of people have unfriended me I think - I realise by watching the numbers you could tell but I don't bother too much.

One 'friend' after an argument blocked me from FB, a year later I was being asked how to 'unblock me' and then a year later I had to remove that person from the list of friends since the things on the FB page were disturbing to me... but no blocking though - one day we might be Facebook frenz again.

And I like to see when people frenzing back people who in real life we hear dey had story wid (and I was happy when this married couple professed love to each other when I know they been  having some troubles.. even if I think they too old to be doing that). I would unfriend anybody who professing love to their partner if I know they cheating though.

I like how the politicians are frenz wid each odder across party lines.

My frenz frenz though.. when I creep (mind people business)  I am amazed at who know who and who liking which politican page and so on.. I mean.. I never knew. But then.. I wonder if they doing it because of they wuk or livelihood - in one or two cases I think they do believe in the political party's they 'liking'.


Facebook was apparently made for school friends. It has been good to see some school and Uni friends and to connect with them. I am shocked at the people who I thought did not know or speak to me in school who now 'frenzing' me on Facebook. It is also a pleasant surprise to see how aligned some of our views are when I thought in school our ideas might have been poles apart (and maybe they were)

It is funny how I also connected with people who thought I was someone else and that some of those connections have turned into real life meetings and good gaffing.


Another discussion about circles on the new Google + says that it is nice how Google + allows us to keep our connections separate as in real life.. except that I have found on this mishmash of Facebook some of my IT friends reading some of my Human Rights stuff and people seem to be connecting across boundaries - which should probably happen more in real life.

A friend told me that he keeps his friends list private because he does not want his friends to know who his other friends are. Seems to me the kind of thing where a man would pass you in the street 'straight straight' without acknowledging if he think that the person he with would not approve of you.


Privacy
I have not worried about privacy.. what's the point since Wikileaks has taught us that what we think is confidential cannot be confidential. I take care how I say things and I have deleted comments after typing them thinking of how it would appear, not to the person who I typing for, but to the nameless people who watching silently.

I already had to apologise once to a woman who is not my 'friend' for a thing which others suggested I should not apologise for. One of my pictures ended up in Kaiteur News without my permission and has been repeated on another blog.  I am cautious about sharing pictures of children since I have heard that these are being used all over for all sorts of reasons (regardless of privacy settings).

I have attended events which were posted on Facebook.. interesting ones.. and others have come to events which I have advertised and which they would never have known about or attended otherwise.

Death, Birth and IllnessFacebook.. learnt of the death of people here, including the suicide of one of the guys from school who had 'frenzed me' in the early days , and also the death of another colleague. It is surreal since those persons' Facebook pages are still there and active.  Other persons have announced deaths of relatives and I just gone ahead and put 'Sorry to hear etc' in a very inane way as though my 10 seconds of typing would do anything to alleviate anybody's grief.. but Facebook allows us to do those polite things.

I friken to put up my own birth date since identity theft is a big thing but other people have no such fears.. mebbe I too big minded about my own identity to think is one that somebody would want to tief. I do the nice happy birthday thing too.. including to people who I know vaguely.. or as I found out recently, is not the person I thought it was.




Dub qawwalli

I crawl through the Facebook wall.. pass all the nice scripture messages; the virus porn videos; the astrology; the Facebook application messages and so on.. to check on what people are reading and linking. It has been good since I have widened my knowledge immensely in a kind of organic way.

But what has been great for me too is the music.. the sharing of all kinds of music - and I learn of music from people like Idan Raichel (Ethiopian/Israeli) and Sami Yusuf (British/Azerbaijani) . Another man I met on Facebook (have never met him in real life) sent me amongst other items, Dub qawwalli - remixes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Connections

This blog though started forming in my mind after this Facebook Guyana moment.  A woman saw me in the post office and came up and introduced herself to me. She said that she liked reading the things from me and Stella (Ramsaroop) to keep updated on her interests and she was glad to see me in person. It was an unexpected thing, but it got me thinking of what kind of influence Facebook has had on my life.