Social Media Blues

What's so sociable about social media?

When we were all sitting staring blankly at TVs, at least we had to fight over the remote every half hour.

Now we sit alone at our computers by ourselves, virtually connected to the entire human population, electronically exchanging snippets of information with people we saw five minutes ago and who are now sitting in the next room at their computer, and with people we haven’t seen in 30 years who are sitting at their computer in Berlin, and while it may constitute a virtual community, it doesn’t add up to being a real community at all.

The little bits of ourselves that we put out there seem to fall into two categories. The bursts of virtual road rage that erupt on political blogs seem to rise out of the protected isolation that people feel at the computer in their room, similar to the protected isolation of the automobile on the road. Because you don’t have to look your correspondent directly in eye, you feel empowered to drop the constrictions of manners and empathy and just let out your inner beast.

The second category of “interaction” is even creepier. This is the avalanche of people at social sites inviting you to join their network of friends, people you sometimes have to scratch your head for 15 minutes to be able to even recall what they looked like, but when you finally pull them out of the memory bank you say, “Sure, I remember you, I’ll be your friend,” because what the hell, there’s a recession on, and the more people I can squeeze into the sinking boat of my career, the more chances are that maybe someone can save me from drowning. [ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: I have real friends, relatives, business partners, and friendly acquaintances on social sites who have at various times enriched my life, spiritually as well as monetarily. But every single one of them I met and stay in contact with offline.]

If you blog, as I do, there’s an entire science of virtual community-building called SEO, search engine optimization. There are even electronic versions of Dear Abby (or Miss Lonelyhearts) who hand out the guidance to online social interaction you need to con people into actually looking at the words that you dump down the rabbit hole of the blogosphere.

Mostly it boils down to being as nice to as many of your fellow bloggers as possible—reading their blogs, commenting positively, making new friends on the site, generating whole streams of insincere comments, linking back and forth, electronically scratching each others’ back as furiously as possible until Google or some other machine out there picks up these signs of electronic interaction and starts sending more people your way for even more back scratching.

Eventually you end up with oodles of readers—or at least positive commenters—who are just as penniless and starved for real connection as you are, but are incapable of responding like real human beings, because they are locked into responding positively no matter what kind of crap you post. And there’s a whole bunch of these electronic soulless beings responding falsely to your blog, so you feel great. You’re writing for a virtual audience and having virtual interactions with a virtual community of friends.

The problem, of course, is that you spend real hours in this virtual community, until you have to face your real life with its real problems and real people and real bills, none of which can be tended or paid with all the virtual currency in the world.

So that’s my rant. And what am I going to do with it? I’m going to put it right on my blog, and share it to Facebook.