Narcissism is Exhausting
About 15 years ago I found email, and stopped writing letters. I figured I’d just wait for my friends and family to discover the same, and then reward them with email updates about my awesome life.
But that wasn’t good enough…
So then I found instant messaging, because trying to have a conversation over email could last weeks. This way, I could interact immediately, even during business hours when the sound of my typing made it seem like I was a diligent sheep.
But that wasn’t good enough…
Then I needed texting because I got tired of jumping through voice mail inboxes just to hear that I needed to pick up milk on the way home, and so I could hide just how drunk I was while making snarky comments – despite the 2:00 am timing being a dead giveaway.
But that wasn’t enough…
Then I needed a blog so I could share my sardonic opinions about stuff and things with the masses, selectively choosing when I wanted to actually defend my sometimes polarizing opinions.
But that wasn’t enough…
Then I needed RSS so I could read other people’s more successful blogs about the stuff and things I liked, and share my comments about their sardonic opinions.
But that wasn’t enough…
Then I needed Facebook so I could let the people I barely knew as a teenager find out more about what I had been up to all these years. Oh yeah, and for pictures of kids, and silly quizzes, and other distractions.
But that wasn’t good enough…
Then I needed Twitter so I could have a way to share my drunken snarky text messages with the world! And of course so I could opt-in to other people’s self-marketing while trying to follow the news.
But that wasn’t enough…
Then I needed Google Latitude so I could show my friends where I am at any given moment; so that they could text me and say “I know where you are!”, and then Facebook “I know where he is!”, and then Tweet “Just saw so-and-so on Latitude. So cool”!
And all this so that some random dude that I once knew in 3rd grade, who happens to be subscribing to all this shit, could know way too much about me.
So I’m guessing at this point you probably think my point is that this is overkill. We have way too many ways of knowing way too much about each other!
Not so! Actually, the beauty of all these media, unlike something like a Zabasearch, is that they are opt-in.
A lot of the technologically challenged will regret posting their description of last night’s sexual exploits on their friend’s Facebook wall instead of that friend’s Inbox; or texting their booby pic to their entire following on Twitter.
But just consider that perhaps those mistakes are just the modern version of drinking too much at the family picnic.And when you take those out of the equation, you’ll find that most people post only what they want the people on the other end of the interwebs to read; and they manage it fairly well.
It’s Neighborhood 2.0.
In Neighborhood 1.0 we just closed the door when we yelled at the kids, yet sometimes a window was open when we had sex with our wives. In 2.0, your door is you data connection, and the window is an errant click.
So if social networking and Internet communications is the beans, then what gives with all the rhetoric?…
Just that on any given day at the office, when the ebb and flow of my social wave is at a peak, I can lose a whole fucking day keeping up with this stuff.
Narcissism is exhausting work.