The Wheel of Fortune

Life is a funny thing.

People ask me why I don't have a Facebook profile. My stock answer is that I've exposed myself online as much as I want to at the moment. I have profiles on AOL, MSN, Match.com, and Blogger. I have entries on CareerBuilder and Monster.com and LinkedIn. I have a MySpace account. I have this blog. I get employment spam and MySpace pseudofriend spam and Match.com "date" spam. I have attracted trolls, vandals, maybe even stalkers. I don't feel like putting any more of myself out there right now.

All that is true.

But the real answer is: Friendster.

You've probably never heard of Friendster. Most people haven't. It was a social networking site of sorts back around the turn of the century, maybe aught-two or so. It was very popular, for a little while. It even got a mention in a MAD parody of one of the Lord of the Rings movies. But things happened, bad business decisions were made, the stars that had aligned moved on. According to the Wikipedia entry, Friendster still exists, but it's a shadow of what it once was.

I never signed on with Friendster. Never saw the need. Back then, some tech-savvy people thought that was odd.

Like a lot of other people, I first heard of Facebook in the wake of the April 2007 Virginia Tech shootings. Facebook entries served as a major source of up-to-the-minute information for friends and relatives, and became impromptu memorial sites for those who had been killed. Suddenly Facebook was in the mainstream, and was getting mentioned several times a day on the major news networks.

I'm not an early adopter. Far from it. But with things like Friendster and MySpace and Facebook, the later you buy in, the more people will have moved on to whatever is next. I sense that MySpace's star has already dimmed, and I think soon the Facebook fad may fade away. Already I have watched more and more regular bloggers drop into silence and inactivity, and more than once I have wondered if blogging's heyday has passed.

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I recently came upon some archived stuff. It's a collection of archived links from a site that I used to visit semi-regularly in 2003. It was a site that had regular contributors, and stars, and superstars. Two of my friends fell into the "stars" category, maybe even the "superstars" category; a link from one of them led me to the site, and a link from the site led me to the other.

Neither of them is active there anymore. One has had her old stuff removed, but the other recently entered into the attic of archives. While rummaging around there, I came across a few more usernames that I recognized, names that had once belonged to superstars. I clicked on the links to their personal websites to see what was going on with them now.

One of the four people whose usernames I recognized was just accepted into Berkley this past February. (Hooray for Steph the Geek!) Two others have had their personal sites removed. A fourth has had her life spiral into complete and utter disaster, at least as of a week ago.

I always thought of the people on this site as celebrities. I guess I've always had a child's view of celebrities - you become famous, you become rich, you spend your idle hours hanging around the pool at your phat palatial mansion or on game shows like Password and Match Game and $20,000 Pyramid. You don't wind up in the "Where Are They Now?" column or turn into Dana Plato.

But of course any celebrity is more likely to wind up in mundane obscurity or abject poverty than they are to find everlasting fame. The Wheel of Fortune turns; one moment you are on the top, but soon you are on your way back to the bottom, hoping maybe you'll get another spin.

They say that where there's life, there's hope. But in this world, in this economy, I'm not sure that's true anymore. I've tumbled quite a bit from where I was just a few years ago, and I know a few other people who have taken even harder falls. As our incomes drop our daily expenses rise, especially due to the skyrocketing price of oil and the knock-on effect on every product that is made from petroleum or consumes a petroleum product in its manufacturing, harvesting, processing, or distribution. The holes we are in are getting deeper. Still, there are others who are worse off. I only wish I could help them all.

Maybe someday I will. Maybe someday I will be able to. Maybe someday soon.

Hang on, everybody. Better times may be just ahead.