virtual suicide

I’m considering committing virtual suicide. I mean, really, what would happen if I just disappeared off the Web?
Do you remember a thing called Friendster? Like many other things (and much like shopping past seasons’ fashions on sale), I joined Friendster when it was already passé, probably in 2003. I’m not sure why I did it, but I’ll guess it had to do with where I was at – ending a five-year relationship and feeling trapped in Sarasota (otherwise known as Sorry-sota), Florida, the retirement town where I chose to spend my twenties. I must have wanted to feel connected and make up for lost time, I guess.
I deleted my Friendster profile about two weeks ago. What finally made me decide to do it was seeing that an ex-boyfriend’s friend (in this case, a non-friend) had been browsing at my profile. But in all truth, I never logged on to Friendster any more and neither did the original hipsters I’d wanted to connect to. I figured anyone from college that really wanted to contact me would have my email address anyway. Plus, there’s Facebook and MySpace. Plus, come to think of it, there’s life.
And then it happened. My college’s alumni association created something called Affinity Circles and I was emailed to join. Before I even made a decision whether to join, I had a few friend invites trickling into my inbox -- many from people I’d just left in Friendster.
A few days later, I bumped into my ten-year old niece on MSN Messenger, and she asked me to do something I’d been avoiding for months – check out her hi5 profile. That one was really scary, because as soon as I joined I was automatically made “friends” of anyone who had invited me to join over the last however-long-I’d-been-avoiding-it. The social network had been ... expecting me.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my niece and I want to be in contact with her. Same with my friends.
But I wonder: Does every relationship require a software interface? And the work of creating a profile for each one, writing down your interests, posting photos – in short, creating a fiction of yourself for others to interact with, time and time again, is so consuming.
For practicality’s sake, I’ve found myself wishing there was one single master social network we could all relate through. Then I imagine that taken to its logical consequences. It's absolutely frightening.
Lately I get the feeling I’m on my way to obsolescence. I ask myself if it’s an exaggeration to think that my day-to-day loneliness is proportional to my virtual connectedness.
So I wonder. What if I erased myself from all the social networks? Can I live off of them? Can you?