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Once upon a time, in the days before I had made it to the internet, I ended up going from intermediate school with friends & kids I had known since third grade to high school with Nobody I knew (ok, with three other boys from my intermediate school, one of whom was the arch enemy of one of my best friends...) and for the next few years I spent a huge amount of time on the telephone with friends. Old school land lines, of the sort where you got a busy signal if someone was already using that phone line. Mainly three close friends who went to two different high schools, and then I also pestered the heck out of my first crush (who I suspect put up with me b/c he was flattered at having an endlessly attentive audience) by calling him daily before he went off to college.
And then I went off to college where phone calls cost money and e-mail existed and was free, followed by the rise of essay & blog platforms shortly after I was released into the world... So, a few years of our arty blog site, followed by a decade on livejournal and the migration here to dreamwidth, somewhat overlapping with having a solid writer friendgroup on twitter before that melted down in the politicapocalypse, and now I'm a regular on a discord group that began with pandemic lockdown, plus side moments of craft forum swapping over the last 15 years and now photos via instagram (tho I still draw the line at facebook proper)... as I observed in a holiday card to my high school best friend (which I do not know if she got, since some of them got eaten due to the tea bags I tucked into them being too thick) I don't know why I expect to keep up relationships I built in person & over the phone when my entire adult life I've spent maintaining community in a text-based & often asynchronous manner.
The other problem, of course, is that as we chart our various courses across the internet we lose people with every platform switch; I could probably find most of my writing buddies again if I gave in to the evil of facebook, as well as the preschool moms group and the *entire SCA*... I think a few of my doll-friends from lj are on tumblr still, but despite its reputation as a low-toxicity weird fandom space their format still gives me conniptions. I have no idea where to find the college friends I briefly reconnected with on AIM... it's a wide world out there on the internet.
Our county moved the school schedule this year so that all the elementary schools (and the high schools, so the bus problems are appalling) start at 8 am, which is a bit of a shock after our previous 9:30-4 school experience, but now school lets out at 2:30 and my child is living her best life running about with her kid posse for half the afternoon. Her friendships are basically entirely proximity-based still; while she has friends from camp and other occasions, some of whom are now in my phone, she doesn't have her own phone yet (a point of discussion that has been coming up recently...) and so they kind of disappear rapidly. It's entirely consistent with childhood and ADHD and the way communities work in general, I guess, and the Megatherium being the little extrovert she is, she has not really clicked with conversations that don't happen in person. (Occasionally video-style chat works, but it comes tinged with the stigma of e-school, and she'd far rather run about with whoever happens to be around, or bury herself in book or video content instead.) If she ever breaks thru the barriers of typing and gaming (both of which she's working towards, tho so far she shares my dislike of games where things attack her) I suspect that the gaming w/ friends may take off-- so far she has been enjoying the "educational" version of minecraft with buddies on adjacent computers.
The downside of the semi-feral kid posse is that in these days where the kids are old enough to roam up and down the street on their own, the adults have far less interaction. I used to get to have grown-up conversations with my child's bestie's mom at least a few times a week, and now I mostly see her in passing or text about kid availability or sending my child home. The days of the pre-school group meeting up at the park are mostly over, I think. It's a shift, and maybe one I should Do Something about, tho in the realm of Doing Things, there are (as always) several other urgent things vying for my attention. And of course I have my pocket friends to type to.
And then I went off to college where phone calls cost money and e-mail existed and was free, followed by the rise of essay & blog platforms shortly after I was released into the world... So, a few years of our arty blog site, followed by a decade on livejournal and the migration here to dreamwidth, somewhat overlapping with having a solid writer friendgroup on twitter before that melted down in the politicapocalypse, and now I'm a regular on a discord group that began with pandemic lockdown, plus side moments of craft forum swapping over the last 15 years and now photos via instagram (tho I still draw the line at facebook proper)... as I observed in a holiday card to my high school best friend (which I do not know if she got, since some of them got eaten due to the tea bags I tucked into them being too thick) I don't know why I expect to keep up relationships I built in person & over the phone when my entire adult life I've spent maintaining community in a text-based & often asynchronous manner.
The other problem, of course, is that as we chart our various courses across the internet we lose people with every platform switch; I could probably find most of my writing buddies again if I gave in to the evil of facebook, as well as the preschool moms group and the *entire SCA*... I think a few of my doll-friends from lj are on tumblr still, but despite its reputation as a low-toxicity weird fandom space their format still gives me conniptions. I have no idea where to find the college friends I briefly reconnected with on AIM... it's a wide world out there on the internet.
Our county moved the school schedule this year so that all the elementary schools (and the high schools, so the bus problems are appalling) start at 8 am, which is a bit of a shock after our previous 9:30-4 school experience, but now school lets out at 2:30 and my child is living her best life running about with her kid posse for half the afternoon. Her friendships are basically entirely proximity-based still; while she has friends from camp and other occasions, some of whom are now in my phone, she doesn't have her own phone yet (a point of discussion that has been coming up recently...) and so they kind of disappear rapidly. It's entirely consistent with childhood and ADHD and the way communities work in general, I guess, and the Megatherium being the little extrovert she is, she has not really clicked with conversations that don't happen in person. (Occasionally video-style chat works, but it comes tinged with the stigma of e-school, and she'd far rather run about with whoever happens to be around, or bury herself in book or video content instead.) If she ever breaks thru the barriers of typing and gaming (both of which she's working towards, tho so far she shares my dislike of games where things attack her) I suspect that the gaming w/ friends may take off-- so far she has been enjoying the "educational" version of minecraft with buddies on adjacent computers.
The downside of the semi-feral kid posse is that in these days where the kids are old enough to roam up and down the street on their own, the adults have far less interaction. I used to get to have grown-up conversations with my child's bestie's mom at least a few times a week, and now I mostly see her in passing or text about kid availability or sending my child home. The days of the pre-school group meeting up at the park are mostly over, I think. It's a shift, and maybe one I should Do Something about, tho in the realm of Doing Things, there are (as always) several other urgent things vying for my attention. And of course I have my pocket friends to type to.