My friend found his wife on Facebook

Jan 29, 2012 Features / Columnists, My Column

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Social networking is the buzzword these days. Just about everyone with a phone is on Facebook and Twitter. People are texting all over the place. Just yesterday morning I got a text message from someone in Arizona thanking me for being there when he got married two Sundays ago.
In days gone by, the ‘Thank you’ would have had to be sent by mail which would have taken a few weeks to arrive. I would have sat down to read the letter, then put it aside, only to return to reading it again. It was not often that people got letters from faraway places.
I had received text messages from faraway places before. In fact, Guyanese who leave these shores, rather than spend a lot of money on phone calls, would resort to texting. I remember being in the United States and receiving a text message. At little or no cost I was able to communicate with the person back in Guyana.
On many occasions while I happened to be checking my e-mail I would see a pop-up. The person may be in China, as is the case of a young man who worked with me. We were time zones apart, but we chatted as though we were just in the same room. Sometimes I happened to be chatting with people in various parts of the world at the same time. Technology has made this possible.
Barack Obama, it is said, won the Presidency in 2008 because he used social networking to the maximum. He collected campaign funding through the social network.
In Guyana, too, social networking played a significant role in the just concluded elections. People in the Diaspora were able to communicate, offering advice and suggestions to the actual campaign workers in Guyana. Young people who went to the homes of potential voters and encountered some difficulty, merely had to turn to the phone, and got advice from many quarters at about the same time.
Long ago, the field worker would have had to return to campaign headquarters, be debriefed, and then re-sent—a rather time-consuming process. Social networking is the in-thing and it is serving many purposes. I suppose that with children being allowed to take cell phones into exams, they would only have to send the question to someone somewhere and that person would simply provide the answer with the invigilator being none the wiser.
But social networking has other benefits. It helped my friend in Arizona get a wife whom he said now has him living in heaven. I was there at the wedding.
I happened to be driving to work one morning when I got a phone call from none other than Francis Farrier. He had just deplaned and he wanted me to talk to someone. Mervyn Jordan came on line. I had not seen or spoken to him for nearly forty years. When I was working at Bartica he was a little boy and I was like a member of his family.
As he told it, one day he happened to be on Facebook and a woman appeared to join in a conversation he was having on an issue. He found that this woman was from his native Bartica and the conversation moved from one thing to another.
He, like me, would often ignore Facebook because we are almost outside the loop. Mervyn said that one day he revisited the site and there were threatening messages from this woman. She wanted to know if he was ignoring her.
To cut a long story short, they developed a friendship that moved from one point to another. He must have proposed, because he came home and got married. The first time he saw the woman in the flesh was when he deplaned a mere ten days before he got married. He claimed that he saw her on Skype, that network that allows one to talk and see the person at the same time. I have seen it used by broadcasters who want to interview sports personalities who are not in immediate reach and certainly not in the studio.
The interesting thing is that from mere words people could actually judge others. Mervyn was able to assess the character of the woman from mere conversations.
I am not sure that I would be so brave, but it just goes to show that telecommunication these days have reached a limit that one can feel as though one is in the same room with the party at the other end of the conversation.
Thanks to social networking, I have friends I have never seen, but whom I seem to know forever. I talk to people all the time. I have a friend in Florida who keeps me posted of developments in his corner of the world.
One of my daughters in New Jersey is in constant contact with me via Facebook and from the look of things, it matters not that I am not there. The phrase that the world has shrunk is now a reality.
And to make things even better, the desktop computer is all but obsolete. When the laptop came in people were walking around with an instant communication tool. They were not office bound. Today there is the mobile phone that would serve just such a purpose once the person is in a ‘hot spot’. Then there is the Ipad which has rendered the laptop obsolescent.
I can only imagine what would come next. Perhaps people would get married through this thing. I do remember people getting married a la Rev. Sung Yung Moon long distance. Then, people had to rely on a communication satellite and a big screen. In the near future the device would be handheld.
Possibility of bigamy? Very real. Possibility of consummating the marriage through these devices—highly unlikely.

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