March 25, 2011
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Walkabout
I was gone for a few weeks. It was good, it was refreshing. It’s always good to dust off the cobwebs and remember what life is really like.
I only used a computer out of absolute necessity, and only for a few minutes. It was wonderful. Based on my eleven days away from facebook, I began realizing what facebook does to the reality of ordinary interactions with other people. And I realized: facebook is not just ‘an addition to’ humanity. I think it is something that has changed humans. We are different than we were before.
Before, when you saw someone, you were seeing all of what they were. There are other places they’ve been and people they know, and in a way a person is initially ’distant’ from you until you speak to one another and connect somehow. We always try to tell our stories so the scenery of our minds is not invisible. Other than that, there are books and movies that you’ve read and watched, and those things are the rest of your mind’s furniture. But even those you can relate to people if you put forth the effort.
With facebook, however, we are not fully where we are. We are ’somewhere else’, too. We are wherever we are, and on facebook too. Our soul has been divided in two; I am with you, but my facebook is my ‘second self’, and since I try to be me on there, and I constantly use facebook, my social life is now split down the middle. Whoever I am talking to in person it now feels like is seeing less than all of me.
Not being on facebook allowed me to talk to people with a renewed sense of purity. It hearkened back to the ancient days when people took all of them everywhere they went, when life was a univocal concept, a full sound that did not dim in intensity from scene to scene. Our stories set in real time and the concepts of the philosophers were what made us; there was no ‘invisible place’ where we could plaster and leave ourselves besides. Life was always filled to the brim.
Xanga, for me, is different. If anything it makes my thoughts more real by cementing them somewhere in reality, and I don’t really get into the hustle and bustle of it. Writing is an ancient practice, and good for life when it doesn’t become the point (writing is the means, true living the end); facebook does not have such an excuse.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about this, if anything, but I do hope I at least transfer meaningless facebook time into reading, if not into spending time in the presence of other divided souls.
Here’s to hoping. Drink up, friends!
(What . . . it’s chocolate milk . . .)
Comments (4)
I get what you’re saying about how we divide our lives up online between the digital world and the real one. Communities online are different, even when made up entirely of people you regularly interact with “in real life”. There’s a different dynamic. We express ourselves so oddly when we’re using the internet. It’s such a hybrid way of communicating. It uses writing and reading, but it doesn’t require full disclosure. It’s like communicating by inside jokes all the time. ALL the time.
Weird.
~V
Wait, I just realized what makes it different from, say, reading letters.
Being online brings that sense of time into it. It’s not a leisurely world. It’s a millisecond-by-millisecond kind of world, where everything is speeding by so fast that all we have time for is that inside-joke type of communication–like communication short-hand–because the seconds are ticking away.
“i’m neither here nor there”"
Wish that you’d cross-posted this on Facebook.
(NB: I was not being ironic (for once) in writing that.)