These streets

Just last week, my mum was telling me of a show on radio she had been listening to that was highlighting the negative effects of Facebook. People had been calling into the show and talking about people they met on Facebook, gifts they received from these Facebook friends and how things had gone wrong. As my mum told me of the weird stuff that the people claimed had happened to them, I brushed it aside. Being the smart girl that I think I am, I told her the people were looking for trouble and they had found it. My reasons being

1. How can you accept someone that you don’t know?
2. How can you allow yourself to get gifts (such as houses etc) from strangers?
3. What are you doing sharing personal information with strangers?

And then it hit me! It’s the same as me and my blogging. I have cyber “friends” that I’ve never met but it’s like we are a part of each other’s lives. We share our joys, our aches, our pains through our blogs. We form a type of relationship and are like a support mechanism for each other. I’ve never met any of these people in person. I don’t plan on accepting gifts from them but a type of cyber trust forms. I sort of let my guard down because I’ve been a part of your life as you go through it. I know when you are on holiday @soaking up the sun in xxx, in mourning R.I.P. gran, at school @burning the midnight oil, etc. I know a lot of information and it does not even take a genius to put certain details together and create a timeline. It’s a matter of listening or in my case reading attentively. When it comes to social networking, people are very naive, myself included. We share some of the most personal details of our lives, we share our exact locations, what we are getting up to, who did what, where, how, when and why. We open ourselves up all sorts of scrutiny from all sorts of sources and this can lead us into nasty situations.

A friend of mine put the following status on Facebook… My friends n family ds world is n has become so corrupt. Plz 4 yo own safety open e below link. It is better to be forewarned than forearmed. Take yo time 2 check out e ladies mentioned in e conversation on fb. Have done so n Lebo Khambule one of e ladies has denied not!!! http://t.co/ueJ4sVYb

Now usually I don’t open these links but she’s not the kind of person to promote spam so I gave the link a few minutes of my life. To say I was shocked is understatement of the year. This link takes you to a blog that posted conversations between a guy and a girl through a social network where the girl states “my boo…#tearing up#…I’m HIV+,yes HIV positive,bn a year now,my boyfriend infected me.Yes,im dying & yes my aim till lyk a minute ago,was to hook up wit u,seduce u so u’d sleep wit me,i wanted to infect u.”

This girl then goes to explain how a group of ladies and guys are going around spreading the virus because they were infected by others too. Now I don’t know if this particular email is fact or fiction but I know the world we live in is twisted and people do crazy things like this. I’m sure the people who do this are probably just hurting and are retaliating against what was done to them but this kind of behaviour I cannot condone. You don’t right a wrong by doing wrong yourself.  It’s a sad misfortune when people adopt the “I won’t die alone” mentality. What’s even worse is that they have statistics to show off on their Monday meetings. In this era of one night stands, friends with benefits, shag buddies etc I can see how this stuff happens. But what happened to getting to know a person better? Condoms? Getting tested before sleeping with someone? Being faithful? Sticking to one partner and not being part of sexual networks? Heck, what happened to abstinence? The only reason groups like this exist is because we give them the ammunition. If we stop accepting strangers on social networks and scrutinise people more astutely before we sleep with them, chances are they will have nothing to talk about on their Monday meetings. And what these guys and gals are failing to realise is that by sleeping with other people to infect them they are exposing themselves to other strains of the virus. HIV is a virus that mutates so just as much as they are killing others, they are making their immune systems even weaker and killing themselves.

I still can’t verify whether the email referred to on (http://thestreetwordiz.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/heres-the-email-everyones-been-going-on-about/) is fact or fiction but whatever it is, people need to be more careful out there! People need to be vigilant for their own lives. At the end of the day, people who actually do these sick and twisted things exist. There are people who are angry with the world, who do not want to go down alone ad plan on taking others down with them.

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The moral of the story is simple. Be extra cautious about who you are sleeping with.