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Facebook Asks, Where Is Home? Who Are You?

April 19, 2010 •

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…

Multi-faceted-people

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.Chris-Cousins-Picnic

  • 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.

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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