A Pilgrim's Digression

If Andy Warhol were alive today, I have no doubt he’d be an avid social networker. I also believe he’d revise his famous dictum, lowering the estimate from 15 minutes to 15 seconds. Or about the time it takes to write a 140 word Tweet, lose interest, and move on to the next fad.

A Slate article on people who post once to Twitter, then are never heard from again, confers something like poetic status on these brief outbursts into the void of time and space. One can imagine some intrepid graduate student in English literature collecting and publishing them in a book of anonymous “Twoetry,” as a way of paying for the health insurance his University refuses to provide its serfs.

Reading this article about Twitter reminded me of another I read yesterday, Can Once-Cool MySpace Stage a Comeback. I never knew MySpace was imperiled, but apparently its position in the online universe of social networking has been usurped by Facebook.

It wouldn’t surprise me if next year, Facebook is the topic of an article about a decline in users due to new competition from [insert catchy web application name her].

Yet it seems to me the problem is not just one of shortened attention spans, but of technology that doesn’t really satisfy our desire for connection with others. Before Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, there was blogging. I’ve been blogging for awhile now. My first posts date back to early 2003 and the start of the Iraq War.

I blog because I like to write and only secondarily because I want to communicate with people. If I wrote primarily to communicate, I’d probably have lost heart a long time ago. No one reads my blog. It’s like a crackpot’s self-published, weekly pamphlet left in a stack on top of a bus station newspaper box. I daresay that’s true of most people’s blogs that aren’t in some way promoted by established online names. A blog is no more a forum for real, valuable interpersonal communication between friends and strangers than writing your congressman a letter is an effective tool for effecting social and cultural change.

I can easily imagine someone starting a Twitter account, or a Facebook account, in anticipation of all the wonderful connections they are going to make, only to find that no one is there. No one cares. The only responses to their tweets are by autobots, chirping “I found your informative post. Keep writing,” while surreptitiously directing readers to Vinnie’svibrators.com.

So they stop writing. And who can blame them.

This isn’t an anti-social networking screed. There have been versions of the online social network for decades now, going back to the topical listservs I subscribed to in the early to mid-nineteen nineties, and probably back further than that. Heck, email address books represent a social network of sorts.

E.M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End could be the motto for our entire online generation: “Only connect.” We want to connect with each other, but speaking only for myself, I find most methods of connection provided by the Internet to be unsatisfactory, if connection and not writing for the sake of writing is one’s primary goal.

Could that be the real reason people don’t follow through with Twitter? Could that be the cause of a friend’s Facebook account going dormant after a month of frenzied writing on walls, taking quizzes, playing games, sending flowers, sperms, boobs, and other assorted graphical detritus to friends, all in the name of “connecting?”

There’s a short somewhere in the connection, as people used to say when telephones were connected to the old networks via real, live wires.

Almost every day I debate whether to delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts, neither of which I make much use of. There is a strong desire in me to go offline. It’s not a Luddite tendency in myself that prompts these thoughts of wire cutting–I would never give up email and probably won’t stop blogging anytime soon. I desire connection just as much as the next person. But I feel like the methods provided to me just aren’t working.

The need for connection is not satisfied by a Tweet to which no one responds. And while I can write a blog post and not care if anyone reads it, a more or less impromptu 140 word statement is more like a sentence spoken in a room of people. We want a response; the presence of others seems to imply that a response ought to be forthcoming, otherwise we are just talking to ourselves.

Only connect. “Only” connect. A simple dictum we all try to live by, in our own way, mostly without much luck. The Internet is littered with the corpses of applications that have tried, unsuccessfully, to help us do just that.