It’s sad really, but I catch myself organizing my thoughts and feelings into Facebook statuses.
Cindy Robert thinks that if people like quizzes so much they should go to school.
Cindy Robert is in love with The Swell Season. 
Cindy Robert wishes she wasn’t in class right now.
I know I’m not alone. When did this happen? When did I start thinking that the best way to express my inner stew was through a delicately assembled one-liner? I realized how out of control my new trend had become as I sat in church listening to a message about our need for one another.
Cindy Robert loves living life on life on life…
Really, isn’t it a bit ironic to be sharing my love for human interconnectedness and community on a vastly impersonal social networking site? Why am I, why are we, so committed to spilling our hearts onto a computer screen?
Perhaps this is the question that led Jonathan Harris, an artist and computer scientist, to track the online world of human emotions. His program combs the World Wide Web in search of how people are feeling. He’s found a virtual galaxy, as he sees it, of love, sadness, fear, hope, and every other nuance of emotion found within humanity. Intrigued by Harris’s insights and questioning my own infatuation with statuses I set out to do a little exploration of my own.
Enter Twitter. The Holy Grail for status junkies. A virtual cesspool of unspoken, yet published, human turmoil and elation.
“I have everythang dat I want but a girlfriend…so sad.”
“Ashamed at how hard i love. want to give forgiveness and smile on sunny days but i still let him hurt my feelings and laugh in my face. why?”
“*Leans over and kisses you softly* I’m glad I make you happy.”
“Ugh, thinking about how I’m going to come out to my family is making me feel depressed….”
“I actually can’t explain how pissed off i am. I was all happy and excited ’bout tomorrow just an hour ago, now look at me!”
“I am elated by the fact that true romance does actually exist.”
Jonathan Harris' We Feel Fine project harvests emotions from the Internet as displays them as tiny dots in a black field. Each dot represents on a different feeling you can click to read.
One quick foray into the spelling mistake ridden world of Twitter reveals a culture obsessed with online emotional exhibitionism.
Some people may argue that there’s nothing wrong with the new online culture we’ve created. I’m tempted to agree, but the sterile one-sided relationship I share with my computer leaves me doubting. Can our obsession with sharing our truest selves online be the greatest proof of our generation’s need for one another? I’m convinced it is.
Behind my status-compiling mind and the millions of Twitter and Facebook status updates written each day is a generation that has forgotten that spending time sharing one’s inner joys or struggles with another human being is the most life-affirming activity we can do. The genuine sense of interconnectedness experienced between two people cannot be recreated online. It is during those human-to-human, friend-to-friend, life-on-life moments where we can truly learn to love others and receive love.
Below, Jonathan Harris explains some of his projects in more detail. You can also see the projects up close at www.number27.org.
Cindy Robert will share her status with a friend today instead of writing it on her Facebook. Cindy lives in the Great White North — more specifically — Alberta, Canada, and makes a habit of helping others live a more intentional life whether she means to or not. If she had one wish, it would be to live in a warmer climate. Kidding. It would probably be something completely unselfish, because that’s how she rolls. Cindy Robert did not write this bio.
It’s very true that digital exhibitionism opens us up a few new and problematic situations. And it should never replace real, physical social interaction.
On the flip side, I think it’s important to acknowledge a new dynamic that social networks like Twitter and Facebook have created. People have been calling it “ambient awareness.” Techdirt explains it better than I could:
My girlfriend and I met each other in person, but our relationship would probably never have happened without both Facebook and Twitter, because it allowed us to maintain an ambient awareness of each other, what we were thinking and what we were up to. Social networking has created and enhanced the best personal relationship in my life in a very real way.
Aside from that, I’ve reconnected with old friends in beneficial ways, improved relationships with coworkers, expanded my awareness of certain issues and ideas and made a few new friends due to this ambient awareness.
Certainly it doesn’t entirely justify the over-sharing a lot of people use status updates for (everything in moderation, right?), but it’s an important concept that is entirely new but beneficial in many ways to many people, and that shouldn’t be discounted.
I completely agree with Cindy. What I’ve found is that online communications, while having introduced new dynamics to living, haven’t improved quality of life whatsoever.
The most I could say for these new communications is that they are just neutral, neither good nor bad, and poor substitutes for real living.
Hmmmmm good thoughts, all.
Josh, I like that idea of ambient awareness. There’s certainly benefits to social networking. I’d be hooped without it. The point is, though, that many people continue to use the internet as their primary source of human connectivity. It’s almost as if we view the internet like the “chaise” at a psychiatrists office, it’s the one place we can truly express our true emotions. We don’t value each other enough to create space and time to listen so we’re driven to artificial methods of sharing.
I am really enjoying all the dialogue that is coming out of this post. Great points, everyone!