Tuesday, October 21, 2008
A flash of panic seized me after I read a piece today about the death of blogging, and how the rise of social networking has rendered traditional online word outlets obsolete. For the briefest moment I considered surfing over to Facebook–you know, just to check it out and not, like, inhale or anything–when it dawned on me the premise of the Wired article was the insatiable desire for more readers, more recognition.
I subscribe to the other, much smaller camp, where I usually don’t want to know you’re here. Obviously there’s a public element to this site, since I’m not furtively scribbling these nouns into a diary with a heart-shaped lock, but there’s a reason for why I cringe whenever “Secondhand Rants” is mentioned aloud in polite company. And if you lop off the “social” in social networking, all you’re left with is LinkedIn, which basically describes the extent of my participation in this phenomenon.
Even then, the foibles of the Internet manifest themselves, with complete strangers who share little more than a common adjective in the alma mater wanting to connect. It’s unprecedented, really. Imagine you’re out at sea, boat bobbing calmly with the waves. Suddenly, you spy one of your high school BFFs within striking distance, so you harpoon him. Just as you connect, a spearhead plunges through your own chest as the chick you met at that one internship friends you, but you think little of it as you pull her aboard, because dammit you’re trying to outwit your work buddy in Ultra Scrabble. Meanwhile, your mother-in-law whispers in your ear a play-by-play of what she ate or didn’t eat today. Time-stamped, of course. And then someone–earmuffs, please!–superpokes you.
That’s the Information Superhighway for you. It amplifies when it shouldn’t, conceals when it should do otherwise, and tracks you from tongue to toilet through a Big Brother built on a swirling expanse of friends, family, and vagabonds. I’m a traditionalist, in case you couldn’t tell, a connoisseur of how things were who’d probably much prefer only being able to choose between the newspaper or the weekly broadcast of Flash Gordon, rather than tweet. Alright, firing up my oven now–and not because I’m channeling Sylvia Plath, but because I want to pretend it’s a hearth.