Radio silence from this smooth-sailing digital ghost ship has been occasioned by rougher-than-usual waters just outside the harbor. The winds gust and shift, scudding across the gray water and into the still grayer sky. The glass is dropping in every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Blog of Watson and farther westward.
Still, we stir as we must. Not to invest any time in mourning lost retirement accounts or decrying the nagging midnight omnipresence of a harsh economic challenge. But in some ways, to keep personal identity from fading out into that gray impalpable world.
We invest so much of ourselves and our time in building these social networks, our webs of blog links and wispy threads of virtual friendships - a weaving process that began during flush times, when the sheer frivolity of a goofy Twitter message or silly Facebook app was yet another dash of whipped cream on our bottomless American ice cream sundae. Still, that wide network has a binding quality that may grow more important as the economy continues to sink like the Skipper in a soundstage pool of Hollywood quicksand bellowing for Gilligan to bail him out.
Last weekend, it was my birthday (Jesse Orosco's number) and I was stunned by the outpouring of (apparently sincere) greetings that came flinging my way via Facebook - some from well-meaning friends I've never actually met. Modern friendship is broad, but it may not be particularly deep. That doesn't stop the sharing, the social graph of Mark Zuckerberg. As Jason Chervokas noted at Newcritics, "the Facebook tag-you’re-it, chain letter style list making craze is hitting fever pitch."
The big trend is lists: your 15 favorite albums, or 25 things about you other people may find interesting. Someone does a list and tags you; by the law of all that is sacred, you're supposed to post - then tag a bunch of other saps - er, friends - who will then keep the chain-letter meme of personal musical taste and "how I lost it" retrospection alive like a grid of Farrah-haired blondes in a Faberge Organics shampoo commercial from the 1970s.
And it works, mainly because of the earnest replies of so many Facebook friends. You can't but groove to an acquaintance's obsession with the guitar stylings of the late (and oh-so-great) Ron Asheton or a business colleague's description of her Jane Austen collection. And sometimes, you just smile at a line from Twitter - or you feel a moment of shared humanity with someone you know virtually. As Fred Wilson writes on his blog, "The status update has become the ultimate social gesture."
The true test for this new wired world - one that my children are growing up with, but that I adapted to - isn't on the far horizon; it's right here in our faces. Will the still-fragile but enormous online social networks help sew together our society as the pressure of unprecedented wealth loss threatens to rip the stuffing out of our lives?
Those birthday greetings, those album lists, those 25 things, those myriad status updates offer a hint - as, I think, blog experiments of small communities like Newcritics do as well. The virtual gathering does, occasionally, make us a bit strong, if only for the sharing. The shadows are falling and I've been here all day, but it's not dark yet.
