Antisocial Networking
To me, Twitter seems to just be an indiscriminate form of texting. Or am I missing something here? But if you see blogging as mostly ranting into the void, I suppose it's better to tweet and have it done with. We are always looking for shortcuts to approximations of life. Cell phone photography can sometimes stand in — the picture's almost more important as proof that we were there than being there in the first place is. Any way we can capture the moment and transmit it live far and wide — that's not just here and now, it's hyper here and now!
The moment Twitter truly arrived was when a passenger on an airplane that slid off the runway in Denver a few days before last Christmas tweeted the crash. Like most things associated with this technology, it was not that the tweets were particularly insightful — first there was "Holy Fucking Shit I Was Just In A Plane Crash!" followed by "ugh... my glasses fell off in the mass exodus getting off the plane .. can't see very well." And then a blurry cell phone picture — no, it's the sheer fact that he was tweeting while it was happening that intrigues us. And that's because an airplane crash seems to be a time to be in the moment if ever there was one. That we can make meta of even the most intensely lived moments of our lives, when we supposedly experience life without the filter, rightly fascinates.
It's only a matter of time before someone tweets his own suicide. "I'm stepping off the ledge now." A quick self-pic on the cell-phone, and: "here I go..."
In and of itself, the play-by-play would not be a work of particular merit, as the twittertariat would quickly point out. Just as there is no journalistic or literary merit in "Holy Fucking Shit I Was Just In A Plane Crash!" In this context, the only value in the medium is its simultaneity with real life. We have a soundtrack for our lives, and now we have subtitles. And as with any work of art, we have critics, subsequent commentary about the quality of our tweets. “By the sound of his language he would be an economy passenger” one critic of the guy in the plane crash speculated. “This whinger obviously knows how to use Twitter, but he’s also worst photographer ever," offered another.
Twitter has garnered a lot of buzz (although it took a couple of years to catch on). Now we have the slightly tongue-in-cheek literary genre, "twiction": micro-stories, under 140 characters (the maximum "tweet"). Here are some samples from Twitter Fiction: "History and love are made by those who show up." — Actually not a work of fiction but an aphorism. "Poison grips my heart as explosion bursts from my loins. Whore-assassin shadow-smiles atop me. In the deep night heat, ravens cackle." — which sounds like a bad, post-coital haiku. "The poison cut deep rivulets in her flesh, her blood caught fire and her heart slowed. Soon she would be dead." OK, you get the picture.
I don't guess there's ultimately any harm in it. I'm not one of these alarmists who think that every new technology that comes along is the death of intelligent discourse. At the same time I don't want to be too optimistic about the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. I think probably the proportion of people saying intelligent things has remained more or less static for millennia. And it's actually fairly small. Most of us are still at "ooga ooga," more or less. Popular technologies, while facilitating intelligent discourse amongst those capable of it, also serves to amplify the "ooga-ooga" for the rest of us.
So while it's true that Twitter has the potential of being useful, it will only really be useful for the few who actually use it usefully. Just as cell phones are undeniably useful, but only if you're accustomed to doing useful things. If you don't do anything useful, cell phone technology merely amplifies the "ooga ooga," as anyone who has ever been out in public knows by now.
Recently, both yahoo! mail and hotmail have added twitter-like features in a blatant bid to move from simple email to "social networking." Now instead of checking your email in peace, you can see what are essentially tweets from everyone in your address book. Just like on Facebook, with the "so-and-so is doing such-and-such" feature. They've also integrated chat, like Facebook. Once you sign into your email, there's a torrent of useless information from folks you may like, or even once have loved, but whose every bowel movement simply doesn't interest you. Is it so wrong to not want to know what your contacts are up to unless it's immediately relevant to your relationship with them?
Truth is, "friend" is a misnomer on social-networking sites. "Audience" would be more to the point. That's why people are so intent on packing their personal virtual theater for their performance.
Of course, you're both a performer and an audience member yourself, as well. It's like a Quaker meeting. Everyone sits in silence until the spirit strikes them, whereupon they stand, announce that they're feeding their cat, or about to take a bath, or just ate a taco. Some applaud, some yawn, some shout out encouraging words, as the spirit moves them.
This is what makes the "25 Random Things About Me" meme seem like overkill to some. The platform is already an endless parade of random things about you. Every day, all the time.
My Facebook experience has been mixed. Like I've said before, I can't be bothered to keep up with all this friending, and the attendant responsibilities of checking in to see who's doing what and when. Since joining mainly out of curiosity a couple months ago, I've had some blasts from the past, but once you've friended one another and caught each other up, it's back to the future, innit?
There have been a couple of people from my past I had been looking for that I found and friended, but the resulting contact was pretty anticlimactic. Partly because, after the initial exchange you take your place among their audience of hundreds, and they take theirs among your audience of tens, and it's on with the show.
I think social networking sites like Facebook can actually prove detrimental to fragile real-world social networks that flourish in a somewhat less airy and transparent environment — through gossip, intrigue and subterfuge — too. That's how people have traditionally forged and maintained social bonds, after all. And then there are folks who, in former times, you could keep at a manageable distance from yourself and each other, who are suddenly there every day with updates on feeding their fish. And you have to attend to them, or they get offended and defriend you.
And what do you get in return for all your trouble? Because, as you and I both know, social networking's not all fun and games. The problem with social networking on the net — I'll be straight with you — is that there's no social lubricant. It's like inviting a hundred and twenty people to a party with no booze, no food, no possibility of sex, where people drift in, blurt out random things at each other and flash pictures of their latest trip to the supermarket, and drift out.
Despite being on the net, and being work, it's not, by itself, effective networking. And, I hate to break it to ya, but it's not really that social, either.
Comments