Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

The use of the Web 2.0 opens new doors as it gives us the chance to meet a lot of unknown people. For a phobic like me, this is enough to crisp my hair.

Getting acquainted with strangers is not an easy task for me. For instance, I would never chat with someone I don’t know. But, you know what? In my 2.0 life I was twice surprised by this subject.

The first thing that surprised me is that social nets allow a type of relationship that places people who don’t know each other close enough to become acquainted without feelings of fear and phobia, and far enough not to feel invaded or intimidated. When somebody sends you a message you can answer it or not. Same thing happens when you receive an invitation to be a “friend”.

Let me give you two examples… When someone like Andrés Huerta writes in his status on Facebook or Twitter “Now Andrés understands: Macri needs to pay low wages to teachers in order to finance the new policemen that will hit them” or Martín Varsavsky writes in his status “While in Buenos Aires when I was asked to comment on the state of the world I said that it is going through an Argentinization process”, you can read them, read them and comment or just ignore them. This power is in your hands.

The second thing that surprised me is that when I look up at Facebook or Friendfeed feeds what my friends are doing I don’t learn that much. Yet, hearing about what people I don’t know enables me to learn about things going on in this world of which I had no idea. I find this possibility much more attractive than knowing about my friends as they all do more or less the same things I do.

Going back to the idea of leaving the comfort zone, social networks are an excellent platform for exploring unifamiliar worlds without being paralyzed by fear of the unknown.

Photo: loungerie

Translation: Ines Hercovich