A couple of posts back, I brilliantly asked why we call it “social media” when so many of us use them to point out where other folks are wrong. The joke depends on how you read “social,” of course, and has a subversive effect. (Knowing that won’t protect you, either.)
At about the same time, I miraculously gave up being critical of any other human being for almost a whole day. It was wonderful: there was suddenly all this room!
The combined influence of these two forces led me to revisit my Twitter page and start deleting negative tweets, in something like an experiment. Yes, the punch line is that there wasn’t much left when I was done, hahaha, but you know I only went back over a couple days’ worth. It’s so easy to mouth off, so easy to leave that gratuitous comment.
In any event, the quest for peak experience goes on. A large part of me knows that worrying about what anybody thinks detracts from that, although independence can be tricky to maintain. I’ve always been an outsider, the new kid in school — the legacy of being an Air Force brat, the product of a dysfunctional family, my lopsided natal chart, and years of mouthing off to save my life the only way I knew how. Yet the pull of the collective is so strong. A person wants to be a part of everything, loved, accepted, recognized, financially rewarded. (Get a haircut and a real job, you stupid bastard!) The tension, the back and forth. The risk-taking, the credit card bills. A hundred incompleted leaps.
Accordingly, and in the context of gaining entrance to contemporary hipness, I’d been visiting Mashable.com. For those of you who don’t know, that’s a popular site for social media news. This was fun at first, and I learned all kinds of nifty things before most people knew what I was talking about. But that was it — not the substance of the news, but merely being first to mention it… This was the first hint that they had hitched their wagon to a hype, and soon it dawned on me how stupefyingly uncritical the writing was. The post that sent me over the top was a recent one praising a Facebook app from Hulu.com that lets you watch a TV show on one side of the screen and interact with all your “friends” watching it at the same time on the other side, like jabbering in a movie theater. (Just something else to separate one from direct experience.) Mashable thought it was God’s greatest gift to humankind, and so did most of the commenters. Everyone was raving about how this was going to be “HUGE,” and all I could think was that the lot of them were out of their minds. I told them so and went on in this vein for a time, until I finally had the good sense and common decency to just delete the bookmark and go away.
Whew. Three days too late, but what the hell.
There’s a similar dynamic at work with Twitter, I now see. Something about the medium drives people to mindlessly post quotations from alleged sages, authors, and each other, producing a veritable torrent of awful homilies and aphorisms. One of the worst practices is endless retweeting of Chopra goombah: “The essence of beauty is bliss,” etc. etc. Sounds nice, but doesn’t mean a thing. There’s also anecdotal evidence (I know, I know) to suggest he may block followers who criticize or make a joke and sometimes sends them nasty notes (see comments here). I don’t know know about you, but maybe I would tweet less and just sell books. Social media can be dangerous! I expect someone to hide his laptop soon, the lucky bastard.
This won’t sit well with many of my digital friends, but it isn’t up to me to make anyone else believe the things I do. That would never work, anyway, because I’m so contrarian. What I really want is to leave the storm of babble, not reform it. Instead of denouncing my inner “GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!”, perhaps I should embrace it — pry that boulder loose on Buddha coming down the road, you know? And then just forget about the whole thing and go fishing!
(I used to be a hero with a cane pole and a can of worms…)
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
re: the pull of the collective vs. the need to be alone and free…. last night i was channel surfing and came across a new made for tv biopic about Georgia O’Keefe on Lifetime. at one point she’s wrestling with the decision to abandon her husband (whom she still deeply loved and missed, even though he was a raging jerkoff who treated her like shit) and New York entirely for a life in Taos (!!!), and she came to the realization that even though she missed all her friends and the social scene and “being a part of it all”, she needed to be alone where she felt truly at home in order to do what she needed to do with her life. “I don’t *want* to be alone, but I know I *have* to be alone.”
it’s hardwired into our genes to merge with some kind of collective for basic survival, but some of us mutants need to be free to follow our own unique loner path to be genuinely happy.
“I am not a number, I am a free man!” –The Prisoner
^_^
Strange connections … Number 6, your quote from The Prisoner rang a bell. I thought it was a movie which starred the brilliant British actor Alan Bates. After a Google search I realised the Bates film was actually The Fixer, but the quote would have been at home in this movie, the story of a Jewish prisoner in Tsarist Russia. A line I have always remembered: When asked “Who are you?” he replied, “I am a man who is not much, but much more than nothing.”
As a result of the Google search I learned, sadly, that Bates had died at the too young age of 69, in 2003. Here’s another quote, which says so much about the man: “In films he often chaperoned showier stars (Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek, Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl, Bette Midler in The Rose) to Oscar nominations; he was the solid ground they danced on.”
carmel: you’ve never seen/heard of The Prisoner??!?? if you have any affinity for being a free individual who refuses to conform and become part of the flock you gotta check it out. a british 1967 tv series (only 17 episodes) created by, written by and starring Patrick McGoohan. a secret agent resigns his job and is abducted to a mysterious sinister “resort” known only as The Village. everyone is a number. nobody knows where The Village is or who runs it. they want to know why he resigned. he wants to escape (and later work against and destroy The Village). here’s the wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
also, american cable network AMC is doing a new remake (with Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellan) so they have the original 1967 episodes available online:
http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner-1960s-video/
“Where am I?”
“In The Village.”
“What do you want?”
“Information.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“That would be telling. We want information… information… INFORMATION!!!…”
“You won’t get it!”
“By hook or by crook, we will.”
“Who are you?”
“The new Number Two.”
“Who is Number One?”
“You are Number Six.”
“I am not a number, I am a free man!”
“AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!!”
as they say in The Village:
“Be seeing you!”
^_^
Johnny-boy,
Twitter-twatter! Stop the planet, I want Off! There is so much good in the digital world that is evolving and also so much crap. I have never twitted, tweeted, (or twatted for that matter) and I don’t suppose I ever will. My gripe is that the language (and presumably the underlying thought processes) is going to hell in a hand cart with so many folks who cannot put together an intelligible written paragraph, not to mention an entire collection of paragraphs woven into a convincing argument. Tweeting is a sure sign of the decline of the culture and to me represents more bubble gum for the mind. So, if you don’t mind I will disregard the pretty yellow text box below and NOT Tweet my comment(s).
You always provide excellent and incredibly honest food for thought that is written very well! Keep up the good work and keep those amazing photos coming.
You certainly don’t need to tweet your comments. That’s there for people who care about that sort of thing, because if they do, it’ll help my traffic. Heh. I agree with almost everything you say, in particular about the language! And I would be happy to get off the planet as well if I only could, probably for all the same reasons.
The only thing about Twitter you may not be familiar with is how good it is for acquiring and transmitting information. I don’t do the social stuff much at all, but being able to do see what certain people think is essential news, links, etc. can be a big help. The fellow who developed the theme this blog runs on tweets on a regular basis, for example, and that’s how I keep up with the latest tips on the software.
That said, if it died tomorrow, I wouldn’t miss it. And I don’t do Facebook except for publicity. Lord knows I have better things to worry about, like living up to your high expectations of me.
I see your point on the technical information aspect of it and it is a good point.
I guess we all get off the bus at different times for different things. It just seems to me that both Twitter and Facebook are so faddish and for some reason just don’t appeal to me. My kids are all over it.
I have told my Mom (she’s almost 88) on multiple occasions over the years to savor her memories of using the good ‘ol reliable IBM Selectric typewriter – a truly fine piece of technology for its day – and not to feel bad about not really understanding all this new age technology shit. Surf the net, use email and let it go at that.
John, please step outside tonight and savor that special New Mexico night time air accented with traces of delectable Piñon smoke for me. Boy, do I ever miss New Mexico!!!
Facebook raises all kinds of danger signals for me. [On the other hand, see later comment, below] Twitter has a dark side, too. It’s perfectly all right not to mess with ‘em. I’m rather negative on these things at the moment, as you can tell. There’s a guy here in Taos I’ve never met except on Twitter, and I said something last week that got him upset — but I don’t know what it was! I even deleted everything I’d written on the day in question — unprompted — because I knew I was depressed and crazy and shouldn’t be writing, but it was too late for him, at least.
Some aspects of Twitter and Facebook go right to an early vulnerability of mine relating to cliques and social pressures in junior and senior high school. No kidding, even at my age! They stir things up in an uncomfortable way that normal folks might not understand. So there’s more here than meets the eye, very tricky for some of us. Color me cautious, at least.
On a related note about where this crazy orb is headed, I had the occasion to visit a cemetery today in a nearby town as I was waiting to have tires installed on the car. It was founded in 1814 and many of the people were interred in the middle of the 19th century. I noticed many where the individual was in their teens or adulthood when Lincoln was assassinated. One can only imagine how these folks would react to society as it exists today! Factor in the steadily increasing rate of change and it is incomprehensible to imagine what young people today will be faced with in the next 50 -70 years. Yikes! When you look at it holistically, even with all the so called advantages and conveniences we have today, I am not sure we are living (or dying) any better today.
Becoming a father would probably have biologically hardwired me for maximum optimism about the direction of our society. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any kids!
BTW, take a look at this…
twitter, as near as i can figure, makes some sense if you have an iPhone, ‘roided out phone with a keyboard and tiny LCD screen, or some similar device. Accessing it from a more pedestrian computer seems to defeat the purpose.
social media can be dangerous but so can any old damn thing. it’s more in how you use it, i think; knives can be dangerous but it’s damn hard to eat a steak without one. i think the key is to only be social on social media with people you’d be social with anyway. though i still have yet to find a damn use for twitter.
I “follow” you because you are where I want to be…Taos. So, I get my Taos fix from you when I cannot BE there.
I love your other rantings, too, but the Taos pics and adobe stories and hiking stories are my favorite.
Thank you.
Why, I do believe that’s a request. There must be some adobe around here somewhere.
In the meantime, don’t forget that you can pull up category archives and find tons of older posts. And there’s a whole two to three years’ worth of other stories from the earlier version of FarrFeed that I haven’t added to the database yet. After I do that, there’ll be hundreds of Taos posts on tap.
Commenter Bill Barker (above) has added me as a friend on FaceBorg. [That is you, isn't it? ] This probably means I need to lighten up.
Just don’t expect me to take those stupid quizzes.