Hello, Kiera

If you go to myspace.com and enter in my email address, you’ll inexplicably be taken to some faceless fifteen-year-old Argentine girl named “Kiera.” For purposes of clarification, let me just say that my name is not Kiera. Nor have I ever been to Argentina.

Kiera has a collection of half-nude photos uploaded to her site. In most, she wears a bikini and takes inelegant torso shots with the help of a digital camera and a mirror. She stands in her well-lit bathroom as if on a catwalk: hips thrust forward, shoulders slouching, stomach tensed, lips frozen mid-pout.

Not surprisingly, Kiera is repeatedly bombarded with friend requests and messages, which means, by proxy, so am I. AlLnIgHtLoNg wants desperately to be my friend. My dear comrades Herpicin and TheClap have sent me enough messages to fill a novella. And though I quickly rerouted all myspace emails to my spam folder, requests for friendship still come in daily, right alongside viagra solicitations and sad news about my Nigerian uncle.

There was a time when I went crazy for social networks. In college, I was proud to be the 11,000th member of Friendster. I quickly and eagerly created accounts with Facebook, Orkut, my alumni association and various soon-to-be-obsolete local sites. I struck up a long friendship with the former president of the Facebook, an attractive man with lofty ambitions and oft disastrous idealism. Hailing from the Silicon Valley, I also had the pleasure of meeting the founder of Friendster, an awkward, intense man whom I was later told might have Asperger syndrome. And it wasn’t just social networks I had to join before everyone else. I fought for one of the first invitations to open a gmail account, back in the days when gmailswap.com was listing people willing to trade Olympics lodging in Athens for an invite. I have one now, of course, as does everyone else with an internet connection. Including, I presume, Kiera.

I’m not sure when exactly social network sites lost their luster. Perhaps it was in an internet café in Southeast Asia, where I saw at least a dozen twelve-year-old boys riveted to their Friendster pages. Perhaps it was shortly after my very young brother created his own Friendster page, and uploaded, as his primary photo, a picture of a half-eaten burrito. For whatever reason, I let the social network craze continue on without me. It’s for a younger generation, I tell my now old self. Let the little brothers have their fun. Knock ‘em dead, Kiera.