mike passaro

The guys over at Between Two Worlds recently posted this article on their blog.  It was sent to me by a friend “in the ministry”.  I’m including the section that was sent to me, as well as my response:

Twitter: The Telegraph of Narcissus

41 comments | Permalink 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 Shine

My response:

Does anyone else see a problem with critiquing twitter on a blog? (isn’t a blog just a little online community that takes the place of actually calling people and telling them what’s going on in your life?…)

Since I’ve been on twitter, facebook, myspace, etc I’ve been able to meet people that I wouldn’t have met in my normal every day.  I see people on a regular basis that ask “how did ______ go the other day?”, “how did the concert go?…I saw that you were out of town”…on and on. I agree with Matt on this one.  Twitter has been a tool in the box to get past the “so…how are things” [shallow] conversation and straight into the details of life.

If I used the online “social networking” tools to distance myself from real community, then I would see a problem.  If I was less involved in peoples’ lives, then I would see a problem.  If other friends were unable to be involved in my life because of my inability to put down the laptop and go have coffee/dinner/etc with a friend…then we have a problem.  I guess I just don’t see the Christian community (at least the one I’m involved in) using twitter and facebook as a way to disengage.  (I can quit whenever I want!…less than 140 characters)

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