It is the distant future in the year 2010...

Me: Look at us!
Anna: What?
Me: I mean, we're talking, face-to-face.
Anna: I guess we are.
Me: Isn't that so analog? Like, there's no electronic interface separating us. We're not holding banana-shaped pieces of plastic to our heads, or pushing buttons. No, we're looking at each other in the face with our eyes and then we're speaking to each other using our vocal chords. How crazy is that?
Anna: Quite remarkable.

Just the other day, Anna and I were contemplating what it means to socialize. I suppose that neither of us has the firmest grasp on the subject, and we spent some time comparing notes on when we considered it appropriate to use a text message. But what freaked us out the most was the sheer size and power of online social networks. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we were left in awe or had our minds boggled. For me, the image that immediately comes to mind when I think of web 2.0 and social networking is that of a glob of grey matter, a mosh pit of neurons, firing off impulses in a storm of activity.

Anyway, Anna recounted how Tumblr, through a string of posts and re-posts of some content that she had made, ended up linking her to an acquaintance who she had not contacted for the better part of a decade. Bizzare. Welcome to the future of human interaction, I guess.

Postscript: Sorry Anna, but I know that that's not how you talk. Well, that's not really how I talk either.

Day 34

So it appears that I've been invited to join the Exodus out of Facebook, in search of a more promising place on the internet. As I write this from a public computer in the East Asian Library, it sounds like quite the reasonable proposal.

For a start, I can (and usually do) reach the people that I want to socialize with via means other than facebook. Second, facebook is a great way to waste large amounts of time that could otherwise be channeled into activities such as curing cancer or inventing a better mousetrap. Third, the majority of content on facebook is spam. These days, most all of the event invitations I get come from people I only peripherally know.

While these are pretty compelling reasons to not use facebook on a frequent basis, I'll probably keep one anyway. It's a pretty powerful directory in terms of looking other people up, and there's a definite utility to being able to contact acquaintances in a non-threatening, non-committal way. Basically, I think I've come to the point where I've realized that facebook isn't by any means an essential social networking tool, and as a consequence, have stopped wasting most of my free time browsing it. I wonder if the generation that invented the telephone had to deal with this. Anyway, I'm keeping my facebook, unless Ramon gives me a damned good reason not to.

Day 32

Strange how a near computer meltdown has left me in a similar mental state. It might be interesting, anyway, to try and live a personal computer-free life. As I type this, the words appear on the screen after a noticeable lag, and webpages take about a minute or two to load even though I subscribe to AT&T's ubernet.

Who knows, perhaps my life will become more productive if I don't own a computer. Unless I end up wasting all of my time with my face stuck in books, that is; the "facebook," some would even say. Today I acquired two such frivolous books of the novel genre: East of Eden and One Hundred Years of Solitude. However did people survive in analog times? Well, we'll see how it goes.

What a technology crisis.