by Garrison Walters
“He who lived well, hid well.” -- Rene Descartes
“He who lived well, hid well.” -- Rene Descartes
If you’re a serious, hard-core introvert like me, the very
word “social” gives you a chill, a quick sense of something ominous just ahead.
Add the word “media” to “social” and you have a vision of hordes
of celebrities invading your private space, the light from their shiny teeth
illuminating the darkest corners of your life.
We’ll, I’m here to tell you that image is wrong, In fact,
social media is much worse than that. It’s the death of privacy. It’s offering
yourself up for sacrifice on the altar of extroversion.
Unless you sport a wingback collar and carry an ink blotting
pad, I assume you use email.
Congratulations on being modern. Not.
I’ll bet you start your emails with something like “Dear
xxxxxxx:” and end it with “Sincerely” and your name. Boring. Not done. Old.
For today’s kids, which means those under 40, the whole idea
of email is so, you know, last century.
The thing today is text messaging. This is kind of odd,
since texting is the bastard child of an afterthought technology. Email has
been around since the ‘70s (that’s 1970s
for you historically challenged brats). Text messaging only got momentum with digital
cell phones in the late 1990s.
Because the original technology of text messaging limited a
message size to 140 characters- -- letters and symbols including spaces –
people learned to be more efficient. So, “you f*ing a*hole” is only 12
characters, whereas the original would be 19. Isn’t scientific progress
wonderful?
The character limit in texting led to all kinds of issues.
One is that communications no longer include any kind of salutation. The
message just starts and ends with no names. You are supposed to be able to tell
who you’re communicating with by remembering the phone number, which can lead
to some excitement for the numerically challenged. “Is that you, 917-456-9…?”
Texting is insidious. A while back, the French legislature
banned email on the floor of the chamber so that members couldn’t be lobbied
while in the process of voting. But they forgot to ban texting (which, to be
fair, hadn’t been invented yet). Now texts are a major factor in legislation.
One wag observed that the precedent wouldn’t be all that bad if they also limited
speeches to 140 characters.
Just as the bite of a flea led to the Black Death, texting
led to Twitter. Twitter is simple, it’s essentially the same as cc-ing someone
in email.
If you want to use Twitter, you go to their site and get a
hashtag, as in #pukemedia, and then anyone who “follows” that hashtag will get
messages you send. In other words, instead of sending to one person at a time,
you can send to lots at once. Very social. Very Brave New World.
If you follow someone, you may or may not be able to reply.
I don’t know because I’ve never used Twitter and never intend to. Also, I’ve
heard that many text messaging services now allow up to 10,000 characters and
even photos. More verbal sludge flowing through the radio frequency sewers.
The other big social medium is, of course, Facebook. I have
tried Facebook, and I’m here to tell you, from the introvert’s perspective, this
program is the heart of evil.
Facebook has “privacy” settings. Don’t believe it. What they
mean is “just a little bit short of totally public.”
The first time I opened Facebook, I saw invitations to
“friend” people I’d never heard of. Also, I was encouraged to share my
innermost thoughts with quite a few folks I had actually met, but whose
acquaintance I much regretted. I declined all these options, but soon learned
that, as “friends of friends”(“friends twice removed?”) these people with whom
I reluctantly shared the solar system would have access to anything I posted if
the friends in-between allowed it – which of course they all do since no one
looks at the pretend-privacy settings.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking: friends of friends can share with friends and
their friends can share, and so on as you life reverberates throughout the
universe. Forever.
A few centuries from now, when work is obsolete, there will
be a new form of social media entirely devoted to making fun of the ancient people
who used Facebook.
Selecting “private” in Facebook is an exercise in self
deception -- like sharing a piece of
gossip on the promise that the recipient won’t tell anyone.
By the way, “friending” may be the most egregious case of verbing
a noun – ever. I’m not mistruthing you.
Needless to say, I’ve never posted on Facebook and never
intend to. However, since I was social enough to have kids, I have to check it
from time to time. Unfortunately, in order to get to what I want to see, I have
to wade through lots of messages, like “Kim Kardashian is trending on
Facebook!” (the Facebook staff never forget the exclamation points).
I presume “trending” means “generating lots of advertising
revenue.”
OK, that’s the two major social media systems for introverts
to avoid. There are some other variations to watch out for, though.
First, there’s Snapchat, which is popular with the kids of
kids. The idea here is that you send a photo rather than a message. Be careful,
though, your picture can’t equal a thousand words since that would be way over
the 140 character limit. J
Kids like Snapchat because they’ve been told that the message
and photo will disappear once it’s been read and can never be retrieved. Obviously,
these poor little innocents have never heard of the National Security Agency.
By the way, whereas email is always stored on a server somewhere
and is hard to delete because it’s backed up in so many places, the phone
companies say they don’t keep the contents of text messages, which are saved
only on the portable device.
Is that Edward Snowden I hear laughing? All the way from
Moscow?
Anyway, Tom Brady swears by texting, observing that all you
need for privacy is a new phone every week plus a sledgehammer and an assistant
to wield it.
Next, we come to Google+, which was/is Google’s train wreck
of a social media system. I’m not sure
it’s still operating. If it is, I’m reminded of the late Frank Gifford who
uttered words to the effect that a team’s opportunity to make the playoff “may
not be dead but it sure is moribund.”
Google+ was designed to compete with Facebook, but it’s better described as the software
equivalent of W’s planning for the postwar governance of Iraq.
I heard the true story of how Google+ got started. It seems
that, after the designers spent months on the logic and flow of the program,
they finished and went out for a beer. But someone left a window open and the unnumbered
pages blew all over. Then a litter of puppies snuck in and played on the paper
strewn floor for a few hours. Finally, the programmers entered, picked up the
papers at random and started writing code.
Yes, Google+ is that bad.
Silicon Valley loves social. For example, someone had the
idea that people would want to share photos in real time with other people
nearby. You take a photo of a price tag and it’s automatically shared. With anyone.
Anyone at all. The brilliant people behind this idea got $41M in venture
capital funding, as well as the domain name color.com, and were humming along
when, as I heard it, someone said, “hey, you know this whole idea is really
stupid.” Then everyone in the room looked up from their fancy new laptops and said, “yeah” and the whole thing
collapsed.
I know I’m missing things by not following the social media.
For example, someday KK will get one of her egregious excrescences caught in a
revolving door and the video will be, like, hilarious.
Equally funny will be the video where an eavesdropper
captures Justin Bieber trying to pronounce words of more than two syllables.
But I won’t see these because I won’t be sharing. Fair
enough. We introverts know that if we don’t
talk we don’t hear.
In summary, here is my social media recommendation for
introverts: just don’t.
I’m sure ink blotters will come back some day soon and be
really popular. Probably, they’ll be decorated with little emoticons. That’s
the good news. The bad news is that if you’re not on Facebook you’ll miss out
on the whole thing.
Oh, well.
Who was it who said, “he who lived well, never posted” Was
that Descartes? I think so; he’s been trying to friend me.
PS Due to overwhelmingly trending popular demand, I’m going
to start my own introvert-focused social media app. It’ll be called Introvertia
and will have many different settings for your posts. For example, one option
will be “hold to appear in ten years, but only if I agree a day before.” Look
for it soon; I’m sure the venture capital people will go for it.
