Twitter: The Telegraph of Narcissus

Earlier in the year, I posted a link to some articles suggesting ways to redeem social network. Those are all well and good, yet the more and more I give serious thought to the nature of social networking, the more I am disturbed.

Disclaimer: I have Twitter, I have Facebook, and I will post a link to Facebook as soon as I complete this entry so as to be sure broadcast to the whole world that I have a new post and they should go check it out. Why? So I get a greater hit count and subsequently derive a sense of popularity or greater significance? It's all very unsettling, simply because it has the potential to continue to dehumanize us--marring the image of God, and causing us to continue fleeing beauty. We are content to savor the ugly, and avoid surrounding ourselves with beautiful things. Why? Because they direct our minds to God, and we are immediately convicted of how we squander His beauty by wallowing contendly with ugly things--that includes forsaking the relations of people.

But I digress.

Check out this post from Justin Taylor:

Nicholas Carr, author of the book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? recently blogged about Twitter:

Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.

And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives. The moment-by-moment answer to what is, in Twitterland, the most important question in the world: What are you doing? Or, to save four characters: What you doing? Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin. Quicksilver turns to amber.

And:

Like so many other Web 2.0 services, Twitter wraps itself and its users in an infantile language. We're not adults having conversations, or even people sending messages. We're tweeters twittering tweets. We're twitters tweetering twits. We're twits tweeting twitters. We're Tweety Birds.

He's not done:

Narcissism is just the user interface for nihilism, of course, and with artfully kitschy services like Twitter we're allowed to both indulge our self-absorption and distance ourselves from it by acknowledging, with a coy digital wink, its essential emptiness. I love me! Just kidding!

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

Do I hear an amen?
HT: Andrew Sullivan