Circles and Circles

Things are in the "almost happening" stage.  Various balls are in the air and I'm waiting to see which ones I'll catch and which ones will knock me on the head.  So while I'm doing that, I'll talk about something else.

Just got my Google+ invite.  I played with it some.  The "Circles" idea appeals to me, both because it is, indeed, much less difficult to set up groups and because it smacks me with a kind of realization that entertains me.  I have people in my circles who, to me, seem very important not just on a personal level but to the world at large.  I see people in other circles who I would like to bring into mine (or be brought into theirs). Yet, if I take a step back, I realize (to my amazement) these very important people are nobodies.  I can run into people who have never heard of my important people.

I find myself thinking of the passage in Persuasion where Anne Elliot reflects on how, in her move from Kellynch to Uppercross, all the concerns and worries of Kellynch are unknown, unimportant, or worthy of only a passing reference. 

It's not a new thought.  Everyone has, I think, slammed their noses into the fact that we all live within our own circles and see circles around us from different angles. So often, though, we are too deeply involved in our circles and our perceptions, who we accept and who we want to accept us, and we do not realize how common -- if  not articulated or even cogitated -- this experience is.   The Interwebinet just accentuates and increases the situation and the realization because circles -- groups, cliques, whatever -- can be built on more than the usual vagaries and ephemera, the connections gossamer,  easy to make, easy to break, nearly always with one end giving the line more attention than the other. 

I see in my head the connections between people as circles connected by lines, lines of varying thickness, graduated, dotted, colored.  Some circles have many outgoing, few incoming.  Some have more incoming than they can possibly pay attention to, and so they are the most important, the most desirable.    It's apparent to anyone who uses Facebook or Twitter, who reads/writes a blog, who goes to parties or business conferences, who does anything that involves communicating with other human beings.

Yes, part of this grows out of my own issues.  Deep social anxiety, learning to play-act, knowing one has a false front going while watching everyone else to see (or imagine) dynamics -- all of that does makes the world look like circles and lines, energy exchanging along them.  Google+ just puts it, for the first time I've seen, into a graphical representation that completely makes sense to me.