a-twitter: life in the digital age

i'm amazed by all the means by which the internet helps ppl keep in touch these days. does anyone even remember how to use a phone or make a house call?

i think technology is seriously incapacitating us. i remember before i even got a cell phone how different my personal interactions and relationships were. i mean, i remember having to plan ahead and set times to meet people - wow, can you imagine?! if i was meeting a friend for a date, it was a specific time and place, no if's, and's, or but's about it. you actually had to keep your obligations and commitments, you couldn't just call them at the last minute and cancel or say you were running late.

i'm sensitive to these things lately because of the amalgam of online applications i have recently started using (what i have come to collectively term my "e-life" applications). first, i finally caved and joined facebook. this was a huge personal defeat for me, since i had held off on joining for the entirety of my college career, because i found the idea of online social networking to be shallow and ridiculous. i had better ways to waste my time on the internet, and, as i constantly reminded others, there are other ways of keeping in touch with people.

but, over the years, as more and more people joined facebook, and i continued to refuse, i noticed i was getting left out of what appeared to be a digital modification - no, transformation - of modern life. my friend Robert likes to talk about transhumanism, and i think that now i finally understand what that term (and its philosophy and associated ideas) means. could it be that humans are really adapting themselves, overcoming "undesirable aspects of the human condition," by plugging ourselves in, and loading ourselves up?

i've discussed before my belief that humans are becoming increasingly technology-dependent. let's think about this: life support. "pulling the plug." we liquefy our lives, distill the essence into digital data, and upload it from any port in the world, as long as we have high speed internet access and an outlet. this process of uploading, of instant publication, of visibility, transparency, inescapability... it's invigorating. makes you feel alive, makes you feel real, makes you feel like you've got an audience and what you're doing matters (because it matters what you're doing). "overcoming involuntary death" - everyone a 15-second internet celebrity, everyone an immortal, everyone inhabiting a webspace. my life was contained in the microchips of a small whirring piece of hardware, until it decided to die. when that happened, i felt like it was i who had been erased. so what did i do? i turned to my virtual self and recovered what i could from the internet. life doubling up on itself: all the music i originally found on the internet, recovered again via my own past posts.

the digitalization of our lives has other impliations as well. facebook is not so much a way of keeping in touch with people as it is about keeping track of people. ah ha! - surveillance! yes, it seems that what we're all really doing is keeping tabs on one another. is there any other way to justify or explain the news feeds? we watch for changes in biographical information, relationship statuses, we track the lives of our friends as if our lives were online dramas being played out for entertainment.

now, a shameful admission: i don't necessarily dislike the idea of being able to track every change in every person's life. i actually rather like seeing what people are up to. example: i love using gmail. the chat feature is one of my favorite tech tools of recent memory because it allows me to see when my friends are online and what they might be up to:

i never used AIM as a kid, even when it was all the rage and all my friends used it to keep in touch. i preferred calling people on the phone or riding my bike to their house to say hi (it seems being behind the technological times has always been a proclivity of mine.) the same is true now: i could easily call someone and get a response just as quickly as i could if i sent them a chat. but, i wouldn't get the luxury of a status message for context. it's sometimes nice to strike up a chat with a friend who, by the look of their status, is feeling down, stressed, or lonely. and i'm sure lots of people would agree that it's a great window for expressing emotions without feeling like you're unloading or being extremely desperate, of putting yourself out there without having to risk anything, because the audience you want is there, in that little sidebar, and if they want to talk to you, they will. and you get the benefit of feeling a slight sense of relief and catharsis, without having to wear your heart on your sleeve, so to speak.

it's also a great way to share a link you like, a clever thought or quip, or even your latest poetry: one of my friends wrote a series of sonnets using the gchat status message as a creative medium (he found the character limit to be an interesting creative feature). i used to document away messages, finding them to be fantastic narratives (that document has since been lost in the death of external harddrive, boooo.)

but, as much as i love status narratives, twitter has taken this to a completely new level. holy shit, man, this thing is madness!!


here is a sight [sic] where you can upload away messages, as if it were a blog, and it stores them for you, as a narrative! and, you can "follow" people you know, or people you hardly know at all! (right now i am following Achewood and a Miami professor who i never took classes with, just talked to occasionally about living wage issues).

the striking thing about twitter is that, unlike gchat or facebook, it doesn't aspire or pretend to be anything other than a news feed for your personal life. there is no use for it beyond occasionally reminding people "yes, i am in fact, alive." in a digital age where we are constantly connected and plugged in, i find it fascinating that our everyday actions can find outlet and audience in cyberspace. ("i am typing... i am thinking... i am breathing... i am living...")

now, that said, YOU SHOULD BE MY FRIEND AND FOLLOWER ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER!!

;-)
-stef lee

p.s. speaking of narratives, a twitter conversation unfolded on the 'net this (6/6/08) morning: