Thanland

I have too many ‘friends’

I’ve grown increasingly discontent—overwhelmed, really—with all of my social “connections” and “friends” and “media.”

My Facebook account has become a wasteland. While 480 friends there isn’t a bone-crushing number, it is—sorry, folks!—too many people to follow closely, ambient intimacy aside. Sure, social networks are pushing the limits of Dunbar’s number¹ 1. The theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships – about 150. , but after years of reducing friendships to a click of the Confirm button, Facebook has turned my once-quiet “News Feed” into social river polluted with runoff from 14 Farmville farms upstream.

Not only that, but I’ve been on Facebook for the better part of six years. Countless numbers of clicks, likes, comments and other assorted interactions have been dutifully logged and, no doubt, mined for information about who I am, what I like and which marketers line up with my interests. Given Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution and their well-publicized experiments in “opening up the network,” I’m a little squeamish about given them any more information than I have to in order to stay connected to the people with whomI want to stay connected.

Speaking of those people, I do want to stay in touch, even if it only means glancing at a few random snapshots or trying to decipher the musings of serial vaguebookers. But back to the original problem: if all of my social connections only require, at most, me to click Confirm and the other person, at most, to click on Add as Friend—and especially if that person only saw my name and thumbnail photo pop up into the sidebar under “Suggested Friends”—who’s to say that we’re really “friends” at all?

To solve this dilemma I’m doing several things. First, I’m abandoning my original Facebook account. Second, I’ve created a new account. Finally, a new policy: I’m only friending people with whom I have a significant, meaningful interaction. These are terms of art, naturally, and I’m proactively adding a few people I want to connect with (or should have reconnected with a long time ago). But unless I’ve heard your voice, shared meal or a beverage, or exchanged emails or text messages, or written you a letter recently, I’m not adding you as a ‘friend.’

That said, let’s be (real) friends.

Rebooting Thanland

Here we are, once again, starting over.

But first, let’s go back to the beginning, shan’t we? Sherman, set the WABAC machine to November 2002…

I was a freshman in college; a small-town boy getting his first taste of big-city living with a couple of friends from high school. I toiled in the honors program at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Techonology, struggling through physics and calculus. By November, it was just me and Mr. Fink. Joe had moved out, not content to live with our incessant pranks and late, noisy nights. I was restless and in need of a creative outlet.

And thus, Thanland.com was born.

It was a simple site at first. The inaugural post was simply a photo of me sporting a fresh “I Voted” sticker. It was a simple time. The site was filled with tales of spilled cereal, chronic procrastination and roommate adventures. I have a great deal of nostalgia for this time. Blogging was in its infancy, everyone back home was still using 56k modems, I was actually excited about working on something at school.

The best thing, however, was discovering a new way to interact with people. Thanland became a digital hub of sorts for a small community of friends and, as I was often reminded on trips back home, folks in Cook whom I knew but didn’t know well.

Thanland was a brand.

By 2005, the site included a small forum, a live webcam, Hondaid: a call for donations to help repair my aging 1990 Honda Accord (and the subsequent video commemoration of the car turning over 200,000 miles), and several guest contributors.

I’ve restarted this blog many times since, many times with different designs. Each iteration never seems to bring back the magic I felt at the beginning. Each attempt to reboot usually started with a wistful account of how I’d fallen out of favor with blogging, or connecting to people or creating things just for the fun of it.

But I’ve got it figured out this time, see.

Each attempt to reboot Thanland had me trying to recreate the magic of the old Thanland. Instead of trying to create something new, I was trying to resurrect something that had long been gone.

I’m building this new Thanland—I think we’re on version 5 or 6 now— to allow me to be as creative with the layout as I want to be on a per post basis. I can flex designer’s neurons in one article while sticking strictly to text in the next.

I’m cutting out the links for now. There’s too much pressure to post something when you haven’t posted for a while. Instead, it’ll just be what you might call personal journalism—a place to tell my story.

So there you have it. Another wistful reboot of Thanland.

Enjoy.