Facebook Asks, Where Is Home? Who Are You?

Iden­tity is com­pli­cated, as I dis­cov­ered when fill­ing out a Face­book pro­file. Even seem­ingly sim­ple ques­tions like where is your home­town are not easy when you’ve lived in mul­ti­ple places. For mar­ried women, there’s also the com­pli­ca­tion of which name (or com­bi­na­tion of names) to use…

Hometowns

Face­book lets you name only one home­town. Its data­base match­ing lim­i­ta­tion raises trou­bling iden­tity ques­tions if you haven’t lived a sim­ple life, and would like to cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties to recon­nect with long-lost friends… What’s the smart way to answer the ques­tion of where is your home­town?

Do you answer based on where you went to high school? Or, where you attended ele­men­tary school and spent your child­hood years? Where your par­ents now live? Where you lived when bring­ing up your kids? Where you hope to retire? What if you have a sec­ond home, and want to net­work with peo­ple who live in that com­mu­nity?

I answered Facebook’s home­town ques­tion in terms of where I attended high school, but no one from my fam­ily lives there any more. Fac­tu­ally true per­haps, but no longer emo­tion­ally valid. My par­ents have moved to a nearby town. My sis­ters and broth­ers are scat­tered across time zones; only some chose to stay in Mass­a­chu­setts.

By using the high school locale as the home­town answer, per­haps I’ll hear from for­mer high school class­mates. We lost touch years ago when I moved from the East to the West Coast for job oppor­tu­ni­ties in Sil­i­con Val­ley and then the Pacific North­west.

And yes, there’s Class​mates​.com… When I clicked on a link within Face­book to recon­nect with high school friends, it auto­mat­i­cally enrolled me in Class­mates — not my intent. In just a few days Class­mates has annoyed me to death with spam­ming emails. I wasted an hour this week­end try­ing to fig­ure out how to can­cel Class­mates (to no avail), so I’ve had to add Class­mates’ email URLs to my ISP’s junk mail list. My hus­band has sim­i­lar com­plaints.

Names

Editor’s note: Thanks to advice from my niece, this has now been solved. Under Face­book’s account set­tings, if you know where to look, you can enter an alter­nate full name that peo­ple can use for search­ing if they knew you by a for­mer name.

Unless I use my maiden name, there’s no easy way for child­hood friends and ele­men­tary school class­mates to find me, or me them, via Face­book.

• Old friends won’t rec­og­nize me by my mar­ried name.
• My maiden and mar­ried sur­names sound odd together, so I only use them in com­bi­na­tion on offi­cial gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments. Never in real life…
• Because there’s no option for a sec­ond home­town, we won’t recon­nect via shared ties to the town where we attended ele­men­tary school together.
• I now live 3000 miles away, so we won’t just hap­pen upon each other in a shop­ping mall.

Unfor­tu­nately, these data­base con­straints on Facebook’s part mean I’ll lose out on those unex­pected joys of recon­nect­ing with peo­ple I haven’t heard from in years. Which to me is half the rea­son why you join Face­book in the first place, isn’t it? So far the peo­ple who are recon­nect­ing are peo­ple who’ve known me as a mar­ried woman, or extended fam­ily mem­bers… Mostly the peo­ple I already know how to reach.

Per­haps some­day Face­book will add fields to the member’s pro­file to over­come these lim­i­ta­tions. And add to the joys of redis­cov­ery and recon­nect­ing with long-lost friends.