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Is the World Becoming One Big Tweet?

“A revolution isn’t a dinner party.” - Mao Zedong

There’s a blessing (or curse) “May you live in interesting times” that I’ve reflected upon in the last few months.  With the financial system in turmoil, the job market being the toughest we’ve seen in over 70 years, the H1N1 flu spreading rapidly, anxiety is high. On a different level, life is becoming one big tweet.

Things are changing around us on so many levels whether we like it or not.  “New forces are starting to shift and collide.” (Ramo, 2009)  But are we smart enough, more importantly, astute enough to take a step back and look at what’s going on, to factor in history and learn from our mistakes, to correct course, to take the “moments of peril” (Ramo, 2009) and turn them “into historic moments of reinvention?” (Ramo, 2009)

To be honest, I’m a little scared that we aren’t.  We seem to be so busy focusing on the weeds and immediacy that we aren’t seeing the forest for the trees.  We aren’t analyzing and learning and ruminating from a 30,000 foot perspective, instead we’re busy collecting friends and followers, typing pithy 140 tweet-bites, and reacting with knee jerk decisions to create stock blips. We are in the Impulse Era.

Whether it’s studying how social media is affecting our culture rather than focusing on building a marketing strategy or spending “more time talking to the guy serving the coffee and less time informing the world that the coffee had, in fact, been served,” (Bai, 2009) we are drunk on overstimulation.

We see it in politics.  Matt Bai touches on this in his New York Times Magazine article discussing Twitter and politics…

“Politics today is already too simplistic and binary, its news cycle more comically truncated and ephemeral than at any time in our history; in the age of email, blogs, and smartphones, we seem to react to everything with a kind of frantic, predictable impulse (Tax all the bonuses! Kill all the pirates!) rather than with a longer-term consideration of benefits and consequences.” 

Commenters on blogs and online newpapers rant and rave on topics because they can, but do they even read what they post?  It seems to be more about “hearing” themselves “talk” than about analyzing the particular topic.  Virginia Heffernan discusses this behavior of commenters on online newspaper sites in her article…

“What commenters don’t do is provide a sustained or inventive analysis..”  In fact, critics hardly seem to connect one column to the next.”

 “But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t , as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.  Instead, paradoxically, commenters frequently reiterate [the author’s] own arguments in the services of their would-be critiques.”

“This echo-chamber effect is unpleasant, and it makes it hard to keep listening for the clearer, brighter, rarer voices nearly drowned out in the online din.  Which is too bad: newspaper journalism benefits from reader comments.”

Even the tools that have become enmeshed into our lives are evidence that we aren’t concerned with the bigger picture that somehow, someway they will have to be paid for in the end.  All these mechanisms that we use for free, that are connecting us and increasing the dopamine levels every time we get a new follower, @reply, or friend, have you considered that they aren’t making money yet?  That eventually the venture capitalists will stop feeding the zoo animals.  Are we on yet another bubble that is about to pop, and yet once again we’re too enthralled by the shining object we don’t see the big needle that’s about to burst our bubble.  We just continue to bubble hop.

We are too caught up in the immediate gratification that we don’t seem to be contemplating where we will end up at the end of this adventure.  So it makes me wonder if historians will look back on this time and see another Gilded Age that transformed into a Progressive Era or will we FAIL .  Where will we come out on the other end?  When will we come out?  What will the world look like? 

Time will only tell if it will be for the good or for the bad.  But you can bet it won’t be a dinner party.  However, I agree with Joshua Cooper Ramo from his article, “Brave New Worlds”, “…it’s worth noting that all the insanity around us notwithstanding, there will be a moment when this age will start to make sense.  That brave new world will look very different than it does now.”

So a toast to living in interesting times, may the brave new world not burst our bubble!

 

Works Cited

Bai, M. (2009, April 26). The Chatty Classes. New York Times Magazine .

Ramo, J. C. (2009, May/June). Brave New Worlds. Departures .

 

June Cleaver on Facebook

Why is everyone on Facebook so damn happy?  Have you noticed that the overwhelming majority of status updates are rosy, cheerful, whistlin’ zippity-do-da out of our asshole type things?  Even on Twitter between the “look at my blog post” (I’m guilty of this), RT this or that, or scratch my back I’ll scratch your tweets, the 140 characters are peachy-keen jelly bean.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading the morning streams, and I wouldn’t want to wake up every morning to doldrums.  But really, is everything so great in your life?  Do you really live the Beaver Cleaver life?  I doubt it, behind closed doors there’s stuff going on in your lives that you don’t share and rightly so.  There’s constant censoring and/or branding.  I mean let’s be honest here we all are posting/tweeting the life we want you to see.  We are all marketers in one way or another.  But I have to say there are days that I really just want to post “LA doesn’t want to get out of bed today, not because she’s sick or tired, but because she doesn’t want to face the world another day being unemployed.”  Or “LA is scared and worried and anxious.”  Or maybe just “yell” with the caps lock on expletives one right after the other!  But I pull myself back from the ledge and refrain.  Why it wouldn’t be “appropriate!” (to channel Scarlett)  So, what is too much sharing?  What is appropriate and what’s not?

I’m reading Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners (thanks to a dear friend), and I see the same type of “putting on the airs.”  In the late 1800’s, a marriage was basically a business deal in which the man did as he pleased in work and play, and the woman supported him and pulled the strings behind the scenes, raising the children and tending to the household.  Behind closed doors, most women knew the husbands had mistresses, were in bad business arrangements, etc., but put on a front otherwise to society.  The couple would appear at Galas together as if they were the happiest couple ever when truth-be-told they rarely spent any time together and barely knew one another, let alone, liked, or even loved one another.  Mistresses were a known normality, but never spoken of.  Out in public, “everyday was Friday and the weekends were the Fourth of July”, but behind closed doors it was a different story.  Now flash-forward to today, have we evolved that much?  Granted, formality has lessened and many topics are not as taboo as they were at the turn of the 20^th century, but we continue to paint a different picture than reality.  We just use different tools.

In the Social Graces column of the March edition of Town & Country, Anne Taylor Fleming writes an article titled “Too Much Information: Sometimes it’s best to be sparing in your sharing.”  She has an interesting take on the sharing of information we do with friends and strangers.  She writes “the pendulum has swung wildly in the other direction.  There is no holding back anymore, no self censorship. I share, therefore I am.”  She refers to the 1950’s when you kept things to yourself, and private affairs and private feelings were not discussed.  She laments a little about that past time, but later says, “I certainly don’t want to go back to the 50’s.  I well remember that choking feeling in my childhood: so much unsaid, so much tamped down inside.” 

I, too, remember a choking feeling as a kid in the 80’s/90’s thinking all the other kids’ families were perfect.  I never saw their parents argue, there never seemed to be financial worries over the house payment, my friends’ parents always seemed happy and full of energy.  When over at my house there was divorce and cancer going on, but I dare not say anything outside the house because I wanted my life to be “perfect” just like all my friends’ lives were.  I didn’t realize until I grew up that behind the closed doors of my friends’ homes they were experiencing “ugliness” too.

But today people are airing everything to everyone via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., from personal to political to grievances.  Is this good or bad?  According to Fleming, the advice columnist, “...we have overcorrected; at least that’s certainly the way it feels.”  She goes on to write, “When we tell too much, we give away a piece of ourselves….  We learn to trade our secrets and our deepest feelings – be they of elation or grief – for the instant reaction of someone else, instead of harboring those feelings, tucking them in where they can be reflected upon and relished.”  Huh?  Isn’t this why so many people have been or are in therapy because they “harbored” their feelings?   She concludes with “We need to stop sharing too much.  As life goes on and time gets shorter, every flicker of love or longing or despair needs to be fully felt, not spun into an instant anecdote to be traded away.” 

Where does this leave us?  What is appropriate to share and what should be kept behind closed doors?  Not only is the level of sharing hard to determine, it’s becoming an even harder path to navigate with all the communication tools at our disposal.  Each of us uses social networking for different purposes.  I use Facebook to connect with friends, people I actually know, and I use Twitter more for professional purposes and to communicate with complete strangers.  But we mustn’t forget the “old fashion” way of communicating either, face-to-face.   These tools add complexity to the equation.  Now we have to determine what information we share on different mediums.

After all this rambling, I’ll admit, I’m conflicted.  I don’t have a sure stance on whether to open up or to continue to build the wall.  From what I can glean from the Emily Post bio she wasn’t as surefooted as her Etiquette book denotes on the topic either.  And almost 100 years later, from the modern day advice columnist Fleming, she also doesn’t seem quite sure, as she chooses her words wisely “we need to stop sharing too much.”  Which direction should that pendulum swing?  Where is the happy medium?  Have we evolved to deeper beings or are we shallower than ever?