A Fish, an Alien or a Cup of Coffee Anyone?

By Tengku Zafrul Aziz

TWO weeks ago, Reza sent me an invite for Facebook. I didn’t even know what that was (does that reveal my age?), so I logged on to investigate.

I was greeted by the following words: “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Cool, I thought, but what’s the big deal? After all, we’re connected by email, to say nothing of the mobile phone, so why do we need a site to connect us?

Anyway, I signed up (or Reza would accuse me of being sombong) and a week into it, I was suddenly rediscovering old friends from school, university, distant relatives – people I had lost touch with and hadn’t even thought about for years. My friend count (which is apparently a measure of popularity) continues to grow steadily.

Now I’ve added applications, joined networks and am spending time I don’t really have sending messages over Facebook (as if email and SMS weren’t enough!). Wasn’t there an article in the papers recently about Facebook resulting in a drop in productivity?

My old school friends – Rogue and Syah – seemed more amused than anything at my fascination with Facebook. They were kind enough to tell me that Facebook was just one of the many community portals. There were also Friendster and Orkut and MySpace, to name just a few. And this has been going on for some time. Apparently, I’m “ketinggalan zaman”.

I was surprised. Why do we need so many networking portals to stay in touch and connect with each other, I wondered, as I sent my friend Rica an electric eel for her virtual aquarium. I shrugged to myself in puzzlement as I accepted a friend’s invitation to join another worthy cause, The Foundation For the Protection of Swedish Underwear Models, and another friend’s invitation to join the BARRA Insomniac’s Society. All on Facebook, of course.

A few days later, I was having teh tarik with my good old friend Sam when he broke off a most interesting discussion about our national football team to ask me to start a blog.

I was puzzled as to what Malaysian football had to do with blogs (talk about non sequitur) but Sam assured me it was all connected. That is, he said, my friends would read a blog if I started one as well as the people who watched me embarrass myself on the reality TV show, The Firm.

A few words about my short term as chief executive officer on The Firm: ntv7 chief executive officer Amrin Awaluddin (an old friend) put a gun to my head. I tried getting out of it by telling him I was not an actor and that I had no time and besides, I was not comfortable in front of a camera. To no avail. Which is why you have me there looking serious and solemn, jumping on mistakes during boardroom meetings and terminating nice people on national television. You have my unreserved apology if you had to endure my “performance”.

So anyway, after punching Sam on the arm for being cheeky, I decided that it would be cool to hop on the blogging bandwagon.

It would be a CEO blog, you know the kind they have in the US? And among other things, I could talk about the experience of setting up Tune Money. But two posts into it, I found that my readers didn’t really want to know about the company. They wanted to know about me.

Now I’ve always tried to keep a low profile and stay away from revealing too much private information. But with a blog, I find myself answering comments and telling people what they want to know.

And funnily enough, they don’t feel like strangers. I may have never met them before but they feel like friends.

I wondered about this. Why was I comfortable revealing information about myself online when really I’m a pretty private person? One word: connection.

I’ve written before in this column about my parents’ time when everyone came home from work at 5pm and there was time for family, extended family and friends. We visited each other, caught up over tea and kuih and maintained the strong connections.

Then, the 90s happened and suddenly everyone was working late every day and life dissolved into this crazy rush for money and by extension, happiness. Or so we thought.

We seemed to have more, but our lives became more circumscribed as our circles of family, friends and acquaintances, shrank. No time, we said, no time lah.

Today, you don’t stop over at your friend’s house if you want to catch up with him. There’s traffic and he’s probably not at home and if he is, then he’s probably busy and it will be inconvenient.

Instead, you stop over at his blog. There you get the distilled version of what’s happening in his life.

You see pictures from his latest holiday, read about what happened at work or his musings about life, the universe and everything. Funnily enough, you get a deeper insight into the guy without the requisite small talk that would be par-for-the-course in face-to-face meetings.

And you get onto the networking sites to connect with close friends and family as well as people you haven’t met in years, send them a fish or alien or cup of coffee, to let them know you’re thinking of them. Technology, which tore us apart in the first place, seems to be bringing us together again.

I felt vaguely amused at the irony. As little as I like writing, I find myself looking forward to putting up new posts. I’ve taken to answering the comments at one in the morning, when I have a little breathing space from briefings, meetings and presentations. It’s only been two weeks, and I’m already hooked. As I said, it’s all about connection.

* Tengku Zafrul Aziz’ blog is www.tengkuzafrul.com

(c) 2007 New Straits Times. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.