Cost of being overconnected
There’s something delightfully self-deprecating about that name,
Twitter–we’re all just a bunch of happy birdies, tweeting away in our
trees!–but it also makes me nervous. It’s like the cocaine of blogging
or e-mail but refined into crack. Internet addiction is an old story,
but we’re on the tipping point of a new kind of problem that might more
broadly be called an addiction to data, in all its many and
splendiferous forms.Like any good pusher, services like Twitter don’t answer existing
needs; they create new ones and then fill them. They come to us wrapped
in the rhetoric of interpersonal connection, creating a sense that our
loved ones, or at least liked or tolerated ones, are electronically
present to us, however far away they may be. But I can’t help wondering
if we’re underestimating the countervailing effect: the cost we’re
paying in our disconnection from our immediate surroundings, in our
dependence on a continuous flow of electronic attention to prop up our
egos, and above all, in a rising inability to be alone with our own
thoughts–with that priceless stream of analog data that comes not from
without but from within.
No, I don’t have a twitter account and neither do I plan on getting one !
