I am currently in an accounting class at a local university. I find it to be very interesting. If you look at the history of money in our country, it is interesting to note that we were once on the gold standard, meaning that our money was backed by gold and therefore actually worth something. Eventually we stopped keeping gold to back our currency, and paper money was backed by, don’t laugh, the good credit that the United States has on a world scale (you would think the national debt would ding our credit score, but maybe other countries don’t know about it yet). The recent trend has been to move away from paper money and replace it with virtual money. I’m not talking about people who sell things on secondlife.com, or are forever mining on World of Warcraft and then selling their fake money for real money on ebay. I am talking about the vast number of plastic cards that have replaced the paper dollars and metal coins that everyone used to carry around. The main reason for the change is convenience, and I truly like this more efficient method of spending. Along with the change in currency however, we have replaced our friends as well. While websites like MySpace and Facebook gain in popularity, everyone around me seems to be replacing their old-style friends (a.k.a. people) with virtual friends. These are individual personalities that may or may not be desireable, filtered through cyberspace, who show up as one sentance conversations on a webpage somewhere. Now I like cyberspace as well as the next person, but once I stopped to think that my best “virtual” friend could be a child molester living in a cult compound, I realized MySpace wasn’t for me. So I ask you (and I will try to make the language more understandable to those I am talking to), “Do you have more virtual friends than actual friends?”
IF YES
DELETE “MySpace Account”
SHUTDOWN “Computer”
END IF

Now go out and talk to someone, geek!

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