003 SOCIAL INEPTWORKING The Art Of Disconnection In The Modern Age (INTRO-MUSIC UP, HOLDS A BIT, THEN FADES OUT) Hello, this is lostnbronx. I'm not on Facebook. I'm not on MySpace. I don't have a Website. I don't, I mean not ever, look up my old classmates. I did Twitter for a bit, but it was spammy, and the only people I knew from the real world on there were a couple of names and faces from the misty past who I wasn't really fired-up about bringing back into the here-and-now, if you know what mean, and they hardly posted anyway. I met only one new person on there who was cool, but she was a Cockney Londoner who seemed to write like she spoke, and, well, honestly, I only understood about half of it. Nice person. We've lost touch. I do use Identi.ca a bit, but just a bit -- hardly to its full potential. Not even to it's empty potential. (PAUSE) Okay, I don't know what that means either. What I'm trying to say is micro-blogging seems trivial to me. And by that, I mean in the sense of importance -- NOT in the sense of technology or ease of use. Probably because I don't know how to use it fully...OR emptily. I'm a misanthrope. I don't admit to it, any more than I need to admit to being middle-aged, fat, and balding. There's no need. _I_ know the truth, and no one else cares. I'm online but I'm not post-Web 2.0. I'm not even Web 2.0. I'm not even dotcom bubble. And I don't make friends easily. Poor, poor pitiful me. As alone as I am, I'm not alone in BEING alone. I think, though, that I sit in a somewhat unusual place, in that I HAVE and audiocast, I DO insert myself in online conversations from time-to-time; but like many shy people, I'm oh-so-tempted to lurk -- lurk everywhere, and lurk utterly. I mean, just who ARE these people? These people on the forums; on newsgroups; on Facebook; on Twitter; on Identi.ca, whatever...? I have no facts to back this up, but my gut instinct is that a VAST number of users, use "The Tubes" with a Romulan cloaking device. Why are they unknown and undesiring of BEING known? Because, of course, they -- or I should say, we, because I really DO include myself in their number -- are all soundly afeared of rejection. Yes, that's right, I'm hearkening back to an old saw of mine: I'm referring to that arrogance routinely, ROUTINELY encountered in any community, community, community that we traverse. No offense to Mr. Bacon, who is unlikely to ever hear these words, but that crud don't hold for the regular surfer. Many of us, though we traverse the communities daily, are not REALLY a part OF the communities. Nor is this a fault thereof, on either end. Because, I submit that it is human nature to be afraid. Afraid of what others think; afraid of the consequences; afraid of all we hold as precious. Yes, dear listener... this IS another assault on your patience, and we ARE going to examine one of the VAST issues. Geeks DO think about the fundamentals...surprise, surprise. And, by "geeks", do I include MYSELF in this assessment? Oh, no...no, no, no. I'm a groupie. An outsider. The astronaut wannabe. The coder with no talent, nor head for detail. But I am who and WHAT I am. No tears shed there...why bother? What _I_ bring to the table is EXACTLY the perspective of the outsider. The hope of the dreamer. I watch all of YOU. But the focus here is on the BIG picture, the one issue we, none of us, can ever escape, or distract ourselves from ENOUGH: time. Yes, old saw number two. I'm goin' for the record folks! Time: the one thing there is, quite literally, never enough of. How strange. In the billions of years of existence thus far, and the effectively infinite number to come, we somehow have not been given enough time to work with. Again: how strange. Why wasn't it spread out a little more liberally? It's like there's a shortage, or something! Right about now, I could go into thoughts on religion, or life eternal, or whatever, but I'll leave that sort of stuff to "Information Underground", cha-ching, cha-ching. No, THIS bag of blather actually DOES have a purpose, believe it or not. Specifically, how do we spend our time? Who do we choose to spend it with? In this shallow, TACKY high-tech era...who do we call our friends? Are you alone out there, married or committed, or no? Feeling disconnected, or disassociated? Do words on a screen stand in for a hardy handshake for you? Then sister, brother...you are in silent, but very good company. This is who we ARE, most of us: a colon and a close-parenthesis near-enough to being the only smiles we get or give anymore. Community? Hell...go for it. You might WELL become a handle, a SCREEN name known to other screen names. And you'd be happy enough for that, wouldn't you? Happy enough to get your 15 milliseconds of highly localized notoriety? Of course you would. You are only human. But you see, under all this crap I'm spewing, THIS is the gist: that we don't WANT to be humans...isolated and ineffectual. No, we want, we NEED, to be a part of something greater than ourselves, because, otherwise, all the pain, all the drama, all the sorrow, and work... none of it means anything if all we are meant to do is live and die. So we come together, and we form SOCIETIES. Oh yes, I use the UGLY word. Community is the PRETTY word, but we know what we mean, don't we? We join, we participate, we add to the conversation. Or not. Who the hell is listening, anyway? It's the Great Silence, folks. The REAL face of the networked world is largely blank. Largely noise. The characters, the clowns, the entertainers, no matter how they paint themselves...it is THEY who grab our eyes and ears. It is THEY -- the celebrities -- the CELEBRATED ones -- who somehow extort our time and attention and energy, and yet -- despite this abject cynicism -- without whom, we'd HAVE no societies...no communities...no THING greater than ourselves -- despite this, we look for them and all of it anyway. Because we are wired for beauty, for weakness. Yes both, and in equal measure, and, maybe because they are one in the same. Maybe the vodka is getting to me, tonight. Maybe I foameth at the mouth. If so, my apologies. If NOT though...be warned: your time IS, without any need of hyperbole, supremely limited on an astronomic scale -- fleeting, as it were -- and you'll hear salesmen in many guises: some of them will peddle you a tomorrow they cannot POSSIBLY see, cannot possibly know save through the sales pitches of others long-dead...while different folks will perform the medicine show of the digital age, begging you to see the virtue of their wares. Are we TRULY made thus? Are we nothing more than apes in a pack? Of course not! And of course we are. Sometimes, our grace is shortchanged, as much as our decay is raised. We are both the finest and the foulest of this world -- of this DIGITAL world, and real one to boot. So what the hell is my point? What have YOU, dear, dear listener, invested YOUR irreplaceable time upon? Just this: that we ADD to the world -- the digital world, the real world, the spiritual world, whatever world we value the most -- we add to it only inasmuch as we value ourselves. As we see ourselves and our offerings as being worthy of others' TIME and ATTENTION -- commodities the value of which cannot be calculated. As we see ourselves expending these things, we are called upon for the most awful societal or community-based responsibility imaginable: consideration of the "other". Goodness knows there are plenty who either fail to do this, or who choose not to. Goodness knows, we all could use the kindly thoughts of others now and then. Man! I'm back on that arrogance thing! But you get it now, right? We're HERE. We matter. The things we do, the dramas of our days. We MATTER. On Facebook, on Twitter. Our thoughts, our hopes, our personal outrages...we matter. The music we love, the movies we hate...all of it, all of us...matter. Or maybe not, because I gotta tell ya, I can't STAND that crap, and I believe there are many who feel the same. Are we modern hermits, living alone in the Webby wilderness, those of us who see this irritating trend of tweeting, denting, blogging, Facebookinging every stray thought that passes through what passes FOR our brains, or archiving every bowel movement or unremarkable achievement in the mundane moments of our days -- are WE the head cases here? Or have the inmates taken possession of the asylum at last? Has the inevitable march toward mediocrity that first began with the baby boomers -- those wondrous idealists of the sixties and seventies who put the hippy in hypocrite -- have THEIR forgotten values finally resulted in a world -- digital or otherwise -- where a woman or man with absolutely, positively NOTHING to say, feels odd, uncomfortable, even isolated for not saying it anyway? Well, _I_ say to hell with that. No one cares what I had to eat for lunch. No one cares if I exercised or not. Only _I_ care -- and often, not even -- and I already know what I did! Please, PLEASE! We don't have to go back to the Victorian era, but can have just a pinch, a smidgen, the tiniest fragment of class, of decorum. No one should know every aspect of your life, because most of it is not JUST forgettable -- it is noise, it is a mind-worm, a ringing in the ears... YOU'RE TEARING ME APART!!! But, of course, by "me", I mean you -- because I'm not actually listening, remember? I believe people are filling the void of comradeship and fellowship in this Century with a background buzz; an incessant insective cacophony upon which they are building their lives. This is our present, which is pouring into a future without style or a sense of self as it has been traditionally understood. Beyond post-modern, beyond digital, it's looking to me like nothing less than a true -- though virtual -- and utterly unpredictable demolition and reconstruction of the human condition. We all want to fit into a community? No, no I think most of us now would be happier if the communities all fit themselves into us: we want it all tailored, all adjusted and nipped-and-tucked until the communities fit us like comfy boxer shorts. I contend that we are not creating communities any more than we are communicating when we post the minutia of our days. We're like senile dogs who bark at stray cats, and then keep on barking, because we've forgotten how to shut up. But that's it right there. We ALL want to be heard -- but we don't ALL have something to say. At least, not every waking moment. By all means micro, macro, and mediocroblog your trip on this Earth -- but would it kill you to have a little content? Just a little bit...every now and then. Honestly, you don't NEED to re-post that Slashdot or Digg timesuck you just clawed your way out of. Or links to "shocking news" that's a year-and-a-half old, I mean come on, have a heart! Think of your readers! Think of your old buddy, lostnbronx -- who's not really listening, but let's pretend -- and the seizure, the rapidly approaching critical mass of utter nonsense that the many networks of the computer world will soon experience! We have spam filters that work pretty good these days. Why, then, don't we have crap filters? Can't be that hard! You could start with this episode, even, no skin off my nose! Just put a big strike-through on anything LnB. It won't hurt -- it'll be good for you...a brilliant first step. Just don't stop there...'cause, the clock is ticking. And you're pissing away your moments telling strangers how you're pissing away your moments. (INTERLUDE MUSIC UP, HOLDS A BIT, THEN FADES OUT) Feedback! Didn't get any. Except for this one guy on the IRC -- sorry, forget the name -- who said his podcatcher couldn't catch this show. My RSS feed kept giving his podcatcher errors. Well, naturally, that's 'cause this is an AUDIOcast, not a PODcast. Hyuk! See? It's not JUST about charm and good looks: I can be an jackass too. Fact is, this show is being hosted on a gopher server, and fewer and fewer applications these days know what to do about that. That's a sad thing. I like gopher. I think it's better than the Web, even if it's not so well known anymore. Purity through obscurity, that's my motto. But while I'm at it, I HAVE had some people crabbing that they can't SEE the gopher pages. If that's you, it's because you're using a Web browser. See, 'cause "http://" is not "gopher://"...different spelling there, see? You need a gopher client to see a gopher page, or a gopher plugin for your Web client. A marvelous plugin for Firefox and, supposedly, Chrome does exist. It's called Overbite. I recommend it. It rocks. You can grab that at: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ See? Who loves ya? I'm all about the content baby. The text browser "Lynx" (SPELL IT) renders gopher pages natively, and is a popular choice too. There are others. Maybe you could tear yourself away from Gwibber for half-a-mo, and have a look-see. Or maybe I oughta tweet about it... (GRUMBLE) Take care. (OUTRO MUSIC UP, HOLDS A BIT, THEN LOWERS IN VOLUME UNDER PALAVER OUTRO)