As we celebrate 25 years of the TALON, we are taking a journey through time. Over the next few months, we will share a series of articles from past editions, showcasing the voices, stories, and moments that have shaped our school community. These pieces give us a window into the past, letting us see how students experienced school life, world events, and culture in different eras, and maybe even recognize some familiar names along the way.

Orkut, for Members Only

Rafaella Schivartche, published in September 2005

You’ve probably heard of Orkut, right? Most people who hear about it for the first time think it is useful, that it is an advancement in technology. Disappointingly, it is just the name of the poor Turkish soul who had nothing, and I mean nothing, to do on a Friday night and decided to create a pointless internet server community.

This website works in a strange way. You can only join this network if an invitation is sent to you by a friend of yours who is already a member. I guess that the purpose is to keep the community small and exclusive. However, this in turn failed, because this world of ours really is small and everybody knows everybody, meaning everybody has Orkut.

Anyway, having a certain amount of experience with Orkut, I know. I was coaxed, and whoever invited me to join, you know who you are. I believe I have the duty to inform all of you about the blunt truth behind this community. I’ll begin by telling you that it is a very slow server, which for some reason behaves like a pet. Whenever the server disconnects, a pop-up message appears and reads, “Bad, bad server, no donut for you.” I beg your pardon, that’s the first of many weird things about Orkut.

As I said, and I wish to repeat, there are many odd things about this server. For example, when you are initiating your career, as occurs in many community websites, you are asked to answer a questionnaire.

Except at Orkut, they ask you about your favorite everything. There are questions as dull as your favorite book, if you drink casually, who you are living with, favorite TV series, and the list goes on and on.

One big reminder, if you do start an account at Orkut, please, oh pretty please, put a picture you love of yourself, the one you look great in, and you will never get tired of looking at. The reason I tell you is because there isn’t a single person that has already tried to change their first picture and who hasn’t spent at least a decade not being able to. That’s on my list of stupid things about Orkut.

I have the most important one, the soul of Orkut, but which ironically doesn’t work for anyone, at least effectively. What I’m talking about is finding friends. You can find your friends on Orkut, but there is so much bureaucracy. You have to accept the invitation. It’s all about invitations, you see, and then categorize this friend as not your friend, an acquaintance, a friend, a good friend, and a best friend. First, I didn’t even know there were so many categories for friends. And second, why would you invite someone if that someone isn’t even your friend?

But I haven’t gotten to the point I was aiming for. What I want to say is that Orkut as a means of finding friends is great, but no question, no doubt about it. But what do you do after you put your friend on your My Friends list? Well, there isn’t much really. You either read their profile, go to their photo log, or become their fan.

The somewhat funny aspects of Orkut are the communities and the testimonials. The communities are a hard thing to explain because you might think that there finally is a way of communicating with other people through the server, but that’s not true. You just ask if you can join the community and just hang in there, sometimes receiving emails that have nothing special to say, and sometimes viewing the updated pictures. The communities are ironically enough individualistic because you can talk to anyone, you can leave a comment, but no one ever answers them.

The testimonies range from alumni and schools, including “Graded”, and “I hate Graded”, to gay, lesbian, and bi, going through music and other, which is everything you could possibly think of that exists in the world. The testimonials are a way of letting your friends know how you feel towards them. You can leave a comment and say how much you love and think this person is funny or intelligent.

I hope I have clarified what Orkut is to all of you who have heard about it or who are members and still don’t understand what you’re doing there. I’m not trying to be biased, and I know I have, but this isn’t only my voice and influence when describing Orkut. It’s the voices of many people I know who also joined and are in doubt as to where the effectiveness of this program lies.

Our lives nowadays are so jammed up with schedules and little yellow post-its with our to-do lists that I think human beings have evolved to a point where dedicating their precious free time to a server that does nothing and adds nothing to one’s life has become natural. I just hope 20 years from now I’ll click on the Friend Finder button and cross my fingers before it disconnects and asks me to log in again, hoping it will find my fellow colleagues from high school and make fun of how stupid we used to look back in 2005.