Mike Tharp: Friendship clicks on MyFace

Trogluddite.

That's the word I invented a few years back to describe me and folks like me who are flummoxed by technology. It combines "troglodyte," which means a prehistoric cave dweller, with "Luddite," one who opposes technological change, named after a 19th century Englishman who did just that.

In other words, folks who haven't yet learned to text on their cell phones. Folks who can't tell HDTV from 3-D. Folks who prefer video tapes to CDs or DVDs because you can stop, rewind and fast-forward easier.

Mike Tharp

Folks, in short, who are out of it.

The ones whose old VCR timer blinked 0:00 forever.

So it was with some unease that I let my son Nao -- who only holds a degree in digital media arts from Cal State Dominguez Hills and makes videos of his own music productions -- sign me up for Facebook.

I was in Baghdad this summer. He wanted me to be able to better see his videos and photographs of national parks than through simple e-mail. So I signed up.

My cousin Angela in Austin had made me a MySpace page in late 2007. It looked super sharp, with a 10-year-old fancy photo of me she took, Elvis singing "Blue Christmas" as theme music and other cool bells and whistles. I even listed my favorite movies and songs.

Since then I think I've looked at it twice.

Tweeter? Sounds wussy to me. Grunter, maybe.

But I went ahead and took the leap into Facebook. (I've sometimes confused the two and called them MyFace.)

Dang! Is it a social networking world, or what?

I still don't know how to post a photo of myself on it. And I've never asked someone to be my friend -- don't know how.

But the first week, maybe 20 people asked me to be their "friend." I knew them all, so I dutifully clicked "Accept" and wrote a short message.

One of the most meaningful came from Andy Gallegos, a kid I'd coached in basketball at L.A.'s San Pedro High School for three years in the late '90s. Andy wrote that he'd gone on to become a Navy SEAL, got married, had a daughter.

At the end of his message he wrote, "I never told you this before, but what you taught us about having 'a killer instinct' in basketball made a lasting impression on me. Thank you for teaching me that."

The tide became a torrent.

Dozens of student journalists I'd taught for seven years at Cal State Fullerton asked me to their friend. "Accept," and a note with a link to the Sun-Star Web site.

An ex-wife. Truth be told, we communicate via ordinary e-mail several times a year. "Accept." How could I not?

Staffers from the now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review, the weekly Hong Kong-based Bible, Koran, Talmud and Tibetan Book of the Dead for all issues Asian since it was founded in 1946. (I was its Tokyo bureau chief for three years.)

Trogluddite.

I couldn't figure out how to type in the right commands or hit the keys to nestle into the group's niche on Facebook. FEER's Lily Kan and Charles Smith, my successor in Tokyo, have promised help.

The wife of the head coach at San Pedro High, Jennifer Ezpeleta, reached out and touched me with a nickname only she, her husband Coach Eldridge and I know. Now we're swapping messages.

In one sense I wonder whyinhell we can't just write one another e-mails. Dozens of family and friends reach me that way every day.

But even I realize that the Facebook software -- which I don't pretend to understand -- bridges technosynapses like the old Disney short about what happens when you throw one ping-pong ball into a room filled with mousetraps, each holding its own ping-pong ball. Snap-snap-snap-snap times several hundred ...