Twitter and the transformation of friendship

There's not a chance in the world I'd use twitter. I value my privacy more than that and I don't want to know what's going on in other people's lives every waking moment. I love my friends and family, but I've got quite a bit to do in my waking moments and reading what kind of sandwich someone ate at lunch, isn't my idea of "quality time". I will say that cell phones keep me more connected to my family/friends than before they became so unavoidable. I don't text, though, and the conversations are brief.

My step-daughter worked for us this summer at our family business and she was constantly texting, or being texted. What on earth do these kids have to say to each other? I know it makes me sound like a grouchy old lady, but it drives me crazy. As for FaceBook--another modern day thing I don't get. Seems to me we're raising a whole generation of exhibitionists.

Humanity is groping its way towards a technologically-assisted Overmind.

This is an early stage technology - the real acceleration will come when neural interfaces become practical.

I don't have a Facebook acct., but I can sort of see the possibility of using one simply as a means of connecting with distant friends or relatives--not sharing the "I'm making a sandwich" kind of trivia, but the "I'm going to be in your town next month on these dates" etc. sort of thing. Arguably, there are better ways of doing that for some people than a social networking site--but I can think of a couple of younger relatives who'd be more likely to see and respond to such a message than to remember to return a voice mail.

Twitter is another story altogether. I can't see the allure of reading a first-person narrative autobiographical stream of consciousness tale written by several different people, none of whom have all that much to say on a day-to-day basis. Besides, I'm a wordy person, and it would appear that brevity is the soul of Twit. (Err, tweets. Whatever.)

Rod, what you write about feeling like people are reading your mind is interesting, and one of the main reasons why I think virtual socialization lacks something vital. People are not simply their minds, or the sum total of all their random thoughts. People are mind-body-spirit, and when you only get to see one of those three aspects it's as unreal as only seeing a photograph of someone you'd like to meet, but haven't yet, and might never get to.

Ordinarily friendship begins when people connect both mentally and physically--not in a "physical relationship" sense, of course, but in those thousands of little ways we communicate beyond the verbal. A seemingly uninteresting person suddenly smiles a roguish smile or gives you a glance that can only be described as a look of kinship, that "fellow feeling" that the poet says "makes one wondrous kind," if I'm not horribly misquoting, and the dynamics of the conversation change, ever so slightly. The person who was a stranger at the beginning of the encounter has been bound to you, by the end of it, with those gossamer threads that may one day be woven into a tapestry of friendship--and behind both the words and the images, the thoughts expressed and the serious or silly or tragic or dramatic or dryly humorous way they were expressed, we have caught just a glimpse of the soul.

Words alone, however well or honestly expressed, seldom pull aside that curtain behind the eyes to reveal the spirit beyond. How often do we make the mistake of thinking we really "know" someone we've only "met" online, on a blog or a forum or an e-mail list or some other virtual "coffee shop" of desultory conversation, only to meet them at last and find the experience unaccountably disappointing, or even depressing? Worse, how often do we meet someone from online in a group setting, and feel frustrated that the person we're used to communicating directly with, and who seems to be giving us undivided attention, is now pulled into a dozen different conversational directions with the complete thought left so unfinished, compared to words on a box on a screen that give us all the time in the world to express every part of what we wanted to say?

Truth be told, I've been a little afraid to meet people I only know from online contact. I know of myself that I come across so much better in print than in real life. But this means that what seems like virtual socialization is really just a facade, a poor substitution for the real thing--and a tool like Twitter just seems like it would eventually take that virtual social life to the next level of isolation. Sure, at this point some, if not most, people who use the service are actually friends in real life, but how long will that be the case?

I use Facebook more for the fact that it has several useful tools that I would be doing anyway, but all in one package, kinda like using a Leatherman multitool when I don't really have to get out the entire toolbox for light repairs. That said, I really don't think it's necessary to post my every move on the thing.

I use Twitter in a variety of ways. For journalistic research, as a networking tool with professionals, for breaking news. It has been excellent during the Olympics, the DNC & RNC/GOP Conventions, and when world crisis occurs.

Here in California, where Twitter was created, it has been used as a news alert service. The Fires of 2008, Earthquakes and public safety alerts are beneficial. The USGS has a twitter account and send out "tweets" of seismic activity throughout the world.

I like the prayer and meditation tweets I receive hourly and daily. I like the comments I have received from my followers when they relate and want to comment on my exasperation or exhilaration.
The application is morphing daily.

I use Facebook in the same fashion.

Here's a comedic take, courtesy of Penny Arcade. The humor's off-color, but it's quite appropriate:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/

THis is as connected as I get. I still don't have a cell phone. At forty, maybe i'm already a curmudgeon, but i don't want to be the person that is so busy texting and or talking to their friends that aren't there that they have no real awareness of the people that surround them. It may sound cliche, but I think living in the moment is a good thing and it should involve giving your attention to the people who are in front of you. Have you ever tried to deal with someone who's trying to talk to you and to someone who'

That was me at 1:53.

I avoid using Facebook at each and every available opportunity. Given the demands of a family and a law practice, I simply don't have the time. (This is why I send so many of my posts at 2 and 3 AM. Small children have demands.)

Facebook strikes me as being more of a bother than it's worth. From what I understand, it takes a long time to keep up with the demands of finding out who your new "friends" are and what they're doing. It's rather like having your own celebrity watch list---your very own personalized "People" magazine or some such thing that one can tinker with and manipulate.

"Twitter", on the other hand, seems to me to be very creepy. I don't care to live under a microscope, nor do I have the time or desire to look at other people under one of my own. If I want to know what someone is up to, I'll call them or e-mail them. It's more respectful of their personal dignity, it takes up less of their time, and most of the people I associate with also don't have this obsessive need to know what other people are doing every second of the day.

I've haven't got the time for Twitter or Facebook. Nor the need. I've got a life.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

Can anyone recommend any good sci-fi novels having to do with this phenomenon?
Posted by: erbs | September 8, 2008 1:55 AM

Spider Robinson wrote "Time Pressure" on that theme. If I think of others, I'll post them.

Here is a Wikipedia entry on the subject:

Technological Telepathy is also present in science fiction, typically involving the usage of neural implants of some description. A good example is the Conjoiners in the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds. Conjoiners rely on their technological telepathy (referred to by them as "Transenlightenment") to the extent that they no longer actually speak. Certain Conjoiners are able to read, attack and control the minds of other Conjoiners and machines (though not standard humans) using digital attacks, often having similar effects to other telepaths in fiction.

Some people, occasionally referred to by themselves or others as "transhumanists", believe that technologically enabled telepathy, coined "techlepathy", will be the inevitable future of humanity. Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading, England is one of the leading proponents of this view and has based all of his recent cybernetics research around developing practical, safe for directly connecting human nervous systems together with computers and with each other. He believes techno-enabled telepathy will in the future become the primary form of human communication. He predicts that this will happen by means of the principle of natural selection, through which nearly everyone will have the need for such technology for economic and social reasons.[4][5]

erbs, also "Oath of Fealty" by Niven and Pournelle

The original idea of Twitter was to keep people updated about what you were doing, but I don't know many people who use it that way. Typical posts deal with what people are thinking. These days many people tend to work in isolation, and have friends and colleagues scattered all over the globe. Twitter is just like office water cooler chatter for a distributed office.

Although I make my living in technology, I was the last person among my colleagues to get an email address (other than a company-furnished one). I still don't have a cell phone, mainly because there are times I don't want my wife to find me. Such as when I am at the supermarket to pick up a bottle of orange juice, she might call with a short "list" of thirty five other things we "need". I didn't even own a VCR until video tapes were nearly obsolete and that was a Christmas gift. I took it out of the box sometime during the following Lent but I have never set the clock and don't know how to and am sufficiently uninterested in what time the machine thinks it is to learn how. Besides the range and coffee maker have clocks but even without their help, I know precisely when it's time to make tea or coffee.

My kids and siblings have FB accounts but I'm not sure they have Twitter. One of my sisters has 82 friends. Her acquaintances must number in the thousands. I don't think I could cope with such intense socialization. I am however thinking of starting a blog but I am going to disable all comments. It is going to be like a type of public solitary confinement with the posts analogous to scratching on the cell walls. A nutshell with infinite space.

The only other foray into online mischief that I have undertaken is as a contributor to Wikipedia. I started out small, modifying articles with bits of dubious information mainly in classical articles where no one would be harmed except for classicists. They are fair game. Like the time I posted about a nonexistent archeological trove in western Turkey that suggested Herototus was a Persian collaborator. I gave it one of those [citation needed] superscripts and it stayed up a long time until they figured out that neither the site nor the Turkish architect was real. Modesty keeps me from mentioning what I posted about the Shroud of Turin. Though I will mention that I am the source of the revelation that Héloïse based her letters to Abélard on the Epistle of Mary of Magdala to Jesus, a document which the Church subsequently suppressed. To this day it lies ensconced in the Vatican Secret Archive but was for a time accidently available on the Vatican website. Regrettably it has been taken down. Also for a while I posted deliberate anachronisms into history articles but this was frustrating because the articles themselves already contained outright lies. A man has got to know his limitations. But then I found that posting small theological insights into science articles was more amusing. Like Thomas Aquinas' prescience in divining the preternatural essence of tachyons. Sometimes the editors or moderators delete these things, but sometimes they don't. You do what you can. The best thing about this is that when people cite wikipedia, I can point to a specific contribution of mine as an example of its unreliability.

My next Wikipedia contribution is almost finished and I am going to post it in the article about Rod Dreher. It seems he is being sued by a California dermatologist whose book Crunchy Cons is about a pandemic of viral epidermal sclerosis which ran rampant in San Quentin a few years ago. He claims that Rod's use of the same title has negatively impacted sales of his book and kept it from making the NYT bestseller list and depriving him of fame. The doctor is not lacking for fortune however, having sold the most potent mutation of the virus to al-qaeda and a vaccine to the CDC. I will try to get this crucial information up by later today.

A while back I set up a Librarything account where you can list a couple of hundred of your books for free. Other people with the same books show up on your list. I listed about a dozen books, three of which do not exist. At least not yet. I was amazed to find out that seven other people owned at least one of the books. Now I feel I have to write them although I know nothing of wheelchair golf, how to neuter your gerbils, or deconstructing the literature of gourmet cannibalism. I closed my account after getting an email from the owner of the gourmet book. He (or she) sent along his Facebook and Twitter urls.

I'm sorry if this post is too long but I am working on a project in one window and adding to this post in real time. Maybe I need a Twitter account. It's all Rod's fault.

Next update at noon....

I don't use twitter and probably won't ever. I use facebook, but I don't consult or change it often. I have been keeping a livejournal for seven years now, and through it, I interact with many of my friends and a few strangers several times a day. The format is more of an essay than facebook or (certainly) twitter. It's very much like blogging, and the format suits my purposes more than any other communication tool.

The journal has made it possible to keep my friends from other cities close, though I've been mostly away from them for years. Sometimes, I think the people who keep up with me online can see me from the inside, because the content is personal and filtered, than real-life friends who observe me from the outside. On the other hand, context conveys a lot about a person, and context is missing in online relationships. Then, too, I experience pangs at missing events with my far-off friends; I can see their lives moving in exciting directions, and I sometimes wish I could be there, the way I used to.

Just had to follow with this Tweet from Alan Jacobs (Wheaton), which I saw just after posting my comment above: Dorothy Parker, asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence: "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think."

Facebook, and it's just like the Twitter guy says. In 5 minutes, I can read all of my Friends' updates. To replicate that would take hours on the phone, every day.

My closest friends, I still see or talk to or e-mail. But I've got 100 friends that I keep up with almost daily, whom I'd otherwise only see at class reunions or by accident.

Your resistance to Twitter, Facebook, and social networking sites is pretty much emblematic of everything wrong with "crunchy conservatism" in a nutshell. It's predicated on a false hierarchy between "real" relationships (read: "in meatspace," in a small town where neighbors get together for jamborees or whatever it is you do) and online ones.

First of all, while online relationships and meatspace ones are fundamentally different, neither is superior to the other, and the former opens up whole new realms of possibility that did not exist a few decades ago.

Second, small-town life sucks. It fosters close-mindedness and homogeneity, and it's awful for the environment. The only realistic future for humanity that preserves the good aspects of the past 200 or so years of development while still being environmentally sustainable necessarily involves high-density urban living, which in turn is incompatible with small-town social conservatism.

This would not be a problem if people didn't fetishize some imaginary version of small town life and didn't consistently devalue online relationships and any sense of community that is not contiguous with the boundaries of a small town.

"small-town life sucks. It fosters close-mindedness and homogeneity"

That's the most close-minded thing I've read in a long time.