my own private internet

So, perhaps this isn't the most propitious topic with which to reappear on the blogosphere after a prolonged absence, but today I want to communicate one simple message:

I hereby reclaim the right to determine the extent and the nature of my relationship with social networking technologies.

This comes after months of being inundated with text messages, upbraided for not updating my facebook page, and chastised for not twittering. With regard to this last, I will only say that as far as I'm concerned the name speaks for itself. I have spent years trying to surround myself with interesting and thoughtful people and thereby reduce the amount of "twitter" in my life. The other two points, I'd like to discuss in greater detail.

First off, is it okay if I just call you up on the telephone, the old-fashioned way? In this manner, I can hear your voice, your inflection, your pauses, your context - in short, all those extralinguistic cues that help me navigate within our conversation and make our exchange pleasant and rewarding. I have perpetual thumb cramp from trying to keep up with my friends, who evidently all sport mini-QWERTY's on their phones, while I hunt and peck through my traditional ten digits and the predictive text feature on my humble Samsung reveals, yet again, that its vocabulary is far inferior to my own. I think a reasonable rule of thumb, so to speak, would be that if you have more than two questions to ask me upon whose answer the direction of our conversation is contingent, call me. This will save me twenty cents, and potentially carpal tunnel syndrome, and last I checked is still the quickest and most efficient means for two people to exchange information.

Secondly: just because I am on facebook, this does not mean that I am obligated to give you a detailed report of my activities on a daily basis, nor that I should be expected to know everything about you all the time. In fact, it would be nearly impossible for me to know everything about you all the time, given that I would likely have to spend the bulk of my day slogging through everything about all 150 of my friends all the time in order to keep up. Seriously, if I call you up and say "well hello there, friend, how was your day?", are you really going to say "well, I woke up, and it was nice out, so I was happy, but then I was hungry, so I had some breakfast, and then I wasn't hungry anymore, so I decided to get ready for work but the shower was cold, so I was annoyed, and then..."? I think you are a sensible enough person to summarize and edit the minutiae of your day before talking to me, and that this has a lot to do with why we are friends in the above scenario, so why in God's name does this seem like an appropriate facebook status update? Considering the way some people appear to be using facebook, it's a wonder that anyone's status is ever anything other than "drowning in other people's facebook status updates".

I guess my point is that just because I'm not that up on my social networking doesn't mean that I'm a snob or a bad person or antisocial or that I don't like you anymore. Not so very long ago, if memory serves, technology was just one means of facilitating communication between folks. No one thought less of you or laid a big guilt trip on you if you only turned up on MSN Messenger a couple of times a month. Now, suddenly, we seem to have forgotten that the beauty of social networking technology is its versatility: people are free to engage with it however they want, however frequently or seldom they wish, and whenever they choose.

Got a problem with that? I'll be home in an hour or two. Come knock on my door, I'll brew you a cup of coffee, and we can talk about it. Face to face.