lexrob.com

When I drink a cup of cof­fee, I don’t care about it. I expect a rea­son­able tem­per­a­ture, an inof­fen­sive taste, and a famil­iar aroma. That’s it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to take a pic­ture of it. I don’t want to doc­tor a pic­ture of it to make it look like it’s from 1975. I don’t want to look at a doc­tored pic­ture of it. I want to drink it, and that’s all. If I’m not very inter­ested in my cup of cof­fee, how inter­ested could I pos­si­bly in that of a friend, an acquain­tance, an enemy, or a stranger? Well, that answer is kind of complicated.

I’ve had a strange year with social media to the extent that my strug­gle there­with has been a thing that defines 2011 for me. I reckon the ten­sion had been build­ing for sev­eral years, but read­ing Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together helped me to clar­ify that ten­sion. I blogged about it here, and reviewed it for an online jour­nal spe­cific to my pro­fes­sion. I made less noise about some­thing else I read, a blog post by Fred­die deBoer called “the resent­ment machine.” (I rec­om­mend read­ing it!) “the resent­ment machine” cast a new light on all my online activ­ity, from my com­pul­sion for view­ing (and cri­tiquing) other people’s metaphor­i­cal faux-vintage pho­tos of cups of cof­fee to the very premise I’d set up for this blog. I stopped blog­ging, and found myself in the throes of a twit­ter cri­sis, which I nego­ti­ated my way through with a month’s worth of post-ironic meta-tweets that intrigued some and alien­ated others.

In the midst of this twit­ter cri­sis, I hoped never to get harsh or unkind, even though I felt some­thing that felt like anger, or, I guess, angst. I didn’t want to come across as haughty, even though I felt haughty. I did think, and I still do, that I was too good to be tweet­ing and read­ing tweets, but I never wanted that to be mis­con­strued as think­ing I was bet­ter than you, or any­one else who was also tweet­ing. I think we’re all bet­ter than this, or, at the very least: here is some­thing to strive for.

A cou­ple weeks ago, I stopped tweet­ing, and, just as impor­tantly, I stopped read­ing tweets. I’ve prob­a­bly missed out on a few good jokes and a few inter­est­ing arti­cles, but those vacan­cies are filled with a greater sense of peace. My expe­ri­ence with twit­ter has never been marked by peace, even when it’s been the most fun and the most helpful.

I think there’s a fatal­is­tic naiveté about social media that says that this is the way things are, must be, and will be, that this is progress, that this is a rev­o­lu­tion. Funny thing about rev­o­lu­tions is that they aren’t sub­ject to plans. I believe that the future doesn’t exist yet, and even if it did, it would remain unknown even to the savvi­est of web gurus until it stopped being “future.” All this stuff has been creep­ing in on us, and maybe we haven’t drawn enough lines. That doesn’t mean we’re pow­er­less to claim them now. Because social media seems like it’s here to stay, and because it’s always grow­ing and mov­ing into our lives, we must con­tinue to tend to our boundaries.

Twit­ter, as a com­pany, comes across as pretty decent, espe­cially com­pared to com­pa­nies like Face­book and Google. It’s twitter-as-product that con­cerns me. I know that its func­tion­al­ity brings out the worst in me, and I think that it brings out the worst in most peo­ple I’ve fol­lowed or observed. I think that it’s one of the most effi­cient expres­sions of “the resent­ment machine.” Not to say that twit­ter is unam­bigu­ously bad. It’s not. The ques­tion is whether that which is good about twit­ter is worth that which is bad about it. I don’t think it is.