Near, Far, Wherever You Are

Quotidian though they are, People You May Know and its peers are some of the stranger spaces on social media, automatically populated by names familiar and not — in my case, a lineup of friends of friends, local bartenders, business acquaintances, graduate students from seminars past, names I recognize from media Twitter, and plenty of folks I’ve never met or heard of at all. We might turn to a contemporary of Durkheim, Georg Simmel, for a somewhat more subtle perspective on the philosophical and social problems that People You May Know poses. And just as the actual individuals that PYMK recommends me are incidental to PYMK as a category, the names, personalities, and life histories of Strangers (and those to whom they were strange) weren’t of much interest to Simmel.

Source: reallifemag.com