Facebook was the beginning of the end.
It changed our relationship with the internet forever. When we first discovered the internet in the 90s everything was up for grabs, everything was ours. We filled the space with hypertext pages, links, images. A lot of it was quite gaudy and pointless but at least it was vital and more importantly at least it was ours.
This is not one of those rants about ownership and the invasiveness of Web 2.0. We can take all of those things as read. Neither is it some kind of polemic about dumbing down, the quickening of the attention span and the increasingly paperthin nature of our online interactions. Although it probably should be. As the post-millenial decade accelerated into the farcical world we know now we have found ourselves barking, yelping, reducing our communication to the gesture of clicking the “like” box.
Don’t get me wrong: I like Twitter. The 140 character medium and the cross-fertilisation of hashtags blossom into an immediate flowering of a thousand urgent stories from around the world. Too much to take it all at once. Migrainous. Twitter offers information rather than data but perhaps too much of it for our increasingly butterfly-like consciousness.
And I hope you are taking as read that every time we say “we” here it might well only refer to “I”.
Time to slow down. Time to adopt a longer form. Time to speak to fewer people but more coherently and in greater detail.
When my grandparents were still alive the family seemed to congregate frequently around a very long dinner table. My mother was one of nine children. Not all of them were found around that table, but when you added grandchildren, friends and hangers-on to the table it was became a busy and occasionally noisy place to eat. Imagine one of those Jewish family flashbacks from a Woody Allen movie and you get some idea of the scene.
At this sort of family dinner table you develop a fractured and multi-layered consciousness. You listen to a half dozen conversations and contribute to most of them. A word here, a gesture there, a smile, a laugh or an acknowledgement. As with the extended dinner table of Facebook you develop panopticon eyes: clicking a like box, dropping a comment here, and a fuller reply elsewhere.
Sometimes you need to leave that generous dinner table and learn to engage in smaller scale conversations, deeper conversations, and even withdraw from conversation altogether to meditate and continue the longer, slower conversations with oneself.
