It turns out, the present is not dead. According to a New York Times article, recently socialites in Manhattan rediscovered the present when they hosted a series of small parties which were explicitly “off the record”, which meant “no tweeting, no blogging, no photos”. The idea, according to one of the party’s hosts, was “to let invitees talk fearlessly in the present.” He goes on:
We are fighting against this whole idea that everything people do has to be constantly chronicled…People think that every thought they have, every experience – it if is not captured it is lost.
And they are bravely fighting the idea that everything needs to be chronicled, by chronicling this fight in The New York Times.
The rediscovery of the present moment has led to further rediscoveries of things once thought lost, like conversation. One of the hosts exclaims:
When it’s off the record, you actually listen to the conversation, not just wait for your turn to speak.
That a leading newspaper ran an article about a party in which people actually had a conversation tells us something striking about the world in which we live. No longer merely reflective of our social lives, Twitter and Facebook are beginning to shape them. The present moment is constantly being packaged into clever little tweets and status updates, or recorded as endless and instantly uploaded photos. That is, the present moment is chronicled rather than experienced; it is shaped for consumption by others, rather than those actually present. We are in danger of retreating from genuine human relating.
I am probably going too far here. I suspect most people don’t experience things this way. Still, I think it is a warning worth making. Social-networking sites, in some form or another, seem to be here to stay. The danger is, we will become better at relating through technology than in the flesh; better at clever one-liners than genuine conversation, like characters in a sitcom. This is, after all, the safe option. Relating in real time involves risk, the possibility of hurt, disappointment, misunderstanding, boredom. But it also carries with it the possibilty of intimacy, of being genuinely known, cared for, understood, loved. That is, relating in real time actually involves relating, something that Facebook and Twitter, if misused, can get in the way of. By making us all “public” figures, these technologies threaten to make us as well-known as celebrites, that is, not really at all.
September 3, 2009 at 3:33 pm |
This reminds me of a time when a friend wrote a poem for me. He read it to me in a coffee shop and it was lovely. When I asked if I could have a copy, he refused. At first I was hurt, but then he explained that he simply wanted me to receive the gift in that moment and not feel the need to relive it over and over. (The poet is a former roommate of yours Mr. Shamy.)