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Boredom | The Point Magazine

The Unbearable Lightness of Being on Twitter and Facebook

There has been a brilliant — and necessary — discussion springing forth from Matt Haughey’s Why I love Twitter and Barely Tolerate Facebook. It has elicited a wide range of responses.

It has sparked a discussion, a conversation that needs to be had. After all, if any had doubts about the profound effect of social media on our culture, those doubts should be dissipated by now; the effect is real. The next phase is to attempt to understand it. To that end, let’s continue the discussion.

Rian van der Merwe pins down the crux of the problem in Facebook and the Imperfect Past: that we are torn as to how to approach social media.

From the beginning (of Twitter, of Facebook), we’ve endeavored to put our best foot forward online. When we open that little box, when we’re presented with that blinking cursor asking us “What’s happening?”, our first instinct is to present the very best version of ourselves.

Look at me! Look how wonderful everything is in my world!

That predisposition is a natural one. Were it not inherent in human nature, status symbols would not exist. No one buys a BMW for the experience. BMWs sell because they proclaim to the world that the owner is someone to be envied. He has arrived, world: take note.

I’ve been as guilty as anyone in presenting this polished version of myself, and my motivation, I suspect, is not uncommon: we want to provide those who are interested enough to follow us with some value. We don’t want to drag them down; we want to uplift.

More, we present this ideal of ourselves as something to aspire to. Having spent years in sales, I’m quite aware of the power of creating a unified image of your goals and positioning that image so that it stares you in the face, saying “If you want this life, come and get it.” It works, and, incidentally, that tendency may even be an adaptive advantage.

A shift is underway, though. A potentially transformative way to approach social media — indeed, our entire online identity — that I like to call the new normal.

Rian explains it well:

I’m slowly coming around to the idea that if we’re going to embrace public living (in the form of social networks) at all, we should either go all in with the full spectrum of our emotions, or rather not bother. Because if we only share a small, perfect sliver of our lives, we start to create unrealistic expectations for ourselves, and the people who know us.

JD Bentley expands on that thought in The Imperfect Past:

What I find most intolerable about social media—the ability to “only share a small, perfect sliver”—is what the most ardent social media users seem to like best.

With a few clicks and keystrokes, a perfectly boring, mediocre and unenjoyed life can look downright meaningful.

The word I latched onto here is ‘meaningful.’ We present this meaning as a form of value. Our tweets, our status updates are only valuable insofar as they provide some sort of meaning to our followers. Those of us who don’t post pictures of cats stuck in a box or gifs of laughing babies post things because of their perceived value.

Here is the conundrum, then: how do we present the entire spectrum of our lives, our selves while still providing value?

The answer begins in the difference between Facebook’s Timeline and Twitter’s ‘now, now, now’ approach. I’m not a Facebook fan, by and large, but I have to concede that the Timeline feature is somewhat brilliant. It is perhaps the greatest example of doing something with our updates, our data, something Frank Chimero expanded upon in The Anthologists:

The desire to archive things for posterity is the itch that makes yearbooks and timelines feel necessary. We create edges and impose order on documentation to help us understand time, experiences, and ideas.

We create edges to contain our data; to tell a story, and it is the story that can create the value derived from the full spectrum of our lives.

Rian touches on the story we tell through our updates:

Obviously Facebook only tells the story it knows, and most of the time it only knows about your happy times. What we sometimes forget is that it’s conflict that makes the story of our life interesting.

He goes on to quote Donald Miller in an excerpt from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:

When we watch the news [and stories about violence come on], we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are in.

The story is how we create value, and a good story must necessarily contain equal parts light and darkness. Steven Pressfield explains:

The antagonist is the dark side of the protagonist.

A story succeeds precisely because of the presence of darkness, of struggle, because, as Pressfield puts it, “these stories provide us with models for dealing with adversity.”

We can create value by linking to thought-provoking articles, by quoting the occasional inspirational thinker, by spouting off a snarky comment about the latest story to break.

But we can also create value by telling our story. The hopes, the dreams, but also the heartache, the struggle. The world in which we live, like a good story, contains equal parts light and darkness. We’d do well to present each to the world, to better mirror the intricacies of the offline in the online.

I’m not convinced, though, that that reflection should be a perfect one. JD disagrees:

People like me would prefer that the online world was a better reflection of the offline world. People who drive social media prefer the opposite. Social media is a platform for publishing exaggerated accounts that support one’s values. It’s not a collection of facts as much as it’s a collection of persuasive arguments for particular worldviews.

To hope for a better reflection seems necessary, but it can only go so far: no one wants to know what I had for lunch, or that I just stubbed my toe. We can and should be true to our story, but we must also respect the time of our followers, friends, and colleagues. If we fail to do so, they, like us, face the prospect of an endless stream of banalities.

JD gets that, of course. Lamenting the data-mining motivation behind the Timeline, he goes on:

So, on the one side, you have a company that cares about telling a profitable story. On the other side, people who care about telling a good story.

Social media isn’t interested in telling the whole of the truth.

Leaving aside, for now, the motivation behind the platforms (I think we need to delve much further into that discussion, but that’s another post), a couple of points can be made.

Firstly, those people who care about telling a good story are those who will drive the future of social media. As early adopters (read: geeks) are those who now drive, to a large extent, the future of our culture (what is geek culture today is mainstream culture tomorrow), so the passionate voices in the online world have the power to shape the direction of that world.

That’s us. We’re the passionate ones, as evidenced by the fact that we’re having this discussion, that you’re reading this piece.

On the other hand, there will always be the others. There will always exist those for whom banality is the mainstay of their existence: just take a look at the TV ratings for Honey Boo-Boo or the prevalence of celebrity gossip.

We have to be okay with those people living out their existence in the same space as we do. The solution is simple: unfriend, unfollow.

Then move on to witnessing the stories of those who actually give a damn.

Subjectivity & Objectivity: a Contrast

Recently, I’ve come to a crossroads in my writing: I’ve written many essays over the past year or so, but I’ve reached a point at which the things I want to say are too large, too abstract, or too fundamental to properly convey in an essay. The things I want to say are those types of truths that can only be properly told through a good story.

Socrates and Jesus told parables for a reason: they had a greater impact than any other form. We are creatures of story, in fact: it is the thing that our entire world consists of. We tell stories to our children and grandchildren to teach them of our own past. We read newspapers and magazines for their stories of success or failure: the poverty-stricken rise to success through ingenuity; a celebrity meeting his demise at the hands of an ill-advised bender.

As I made the transition to telling stories, I began to think more and more about subjectivity. Even now, as I write this, I struggle with the distinction: do I outline this piece, form a coherent structure, then fill in the blanks? Or do I write it as it comes, so that it becomes a mirror for my stream of consciousness? One implies objectivity by mimicking a sort of journalistic narrative; the other implies subjectivity by letting the thoughts in my head spill out onto the page.

In the end, I’ve chosen a combination of the two.

Let me give you an example of the distinction we’re discussing.

To my mind, there are two titans of Russian literature who perfectly epitomize the effects of subjectivity and objectivity.

Tolstoy was a master of objectivity, if not the master. Take this excerpt from War and Peace:

For him, it was no new conviction that his presence at all ends of the world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy, struck people in the same way and threw them into the madness of self-oblivion. He ordered his horse brought and rode to his camp.

This is a remarkably poignant observation, made all the more effective by its striking tone of objectivity. The subject of the paragraph is Napoleon, and Tolstoy gives us extraordinary insight into his psyche by remaining detached. “Threw them into the madness of oblivion” is particularly effective. The phrase conjures such a wide array of emotion and thought in the reader in so few words. Tolstoy could describe the “madness of self-oblivion,” but he doesn’t, instead opting to allow room for the reader’s thoughts to echo, enhancing the effect. By remaining objective, he allows the reader to transfer something of himself onto the text. The last sentence tells us of the sociopathic demeanor of Napoleon: though he causes this absurdly strong reaction in people, he himself couldn't care less: he simply goes about his business.

Tolstoy gives us the facts, allowing us to draw our own conclusions from them.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

~ Abraham Maslow

Now, take a passage from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment:

Coughing stopped her breath, but the tongue-lashing had its effect. Obviously, Katerina Ivanovna even inspired some fear; the tenants, one by one, squeezed through the back door, with that strange feeling of inner satisfaction which can always be observed, even in those who are near and dear, when a sudden disaster befalls their neighbor, and which is to be found in all men, without exception, however sincere their feelings of sympathy and commiseration.

Here, the subjectivity leaps from the page. Dostoyevsky is describing a scene which may or may be not interesting in and of itself, but it is the imposition of his own beliefs onto the scene which lends the passage its depth of emotion. The simple scene of tenants leaving a room becomes quite powerful when we think of the opinion that all men- every single one- feel a sense of satisfaction at the misfortune of others. In this case, the misfortune is death, and it's appalling to think of the tenants squeezing out of the house with a smug smirk of satisfaction on their face. But once we are sufficiently appalled, Dostoyevsky then reveals to us that we, the reader, should also be appalled at ourselves, because these feelings of satisfaction are present in “all men, without exception,” you, dear reader, included.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

Now, it’s quite easy to contrast subjectivity and objectivity in terms of dead Russian writers, but we’re interested in how it affects our writing.

Suppose I’m writing a piece for Sssimpli, a profile of a new startup. I want to give the reader the facts: this is what the startup does, this is the problem it solves, these are the devices it works on, etc. There is an objective element.

I don’t want to remain completely objective, though. The things I write about on Sssimpli (and indeed everywhere) are things that I feel strongly about. I’m excited about this particular startup, and I want to convey that excitement to the reader. I can only do that (or, rather, I can do it much more effectively) with subjectivity.

A similar chord is struck on link blogs: take a couple of examples from Rian Van der Merwe’s homepage. One recent entry points to a New York Times op-ed: Rian offers a simple opening statement, a quote from the piece, then ends with: “I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just link there quietly.” He offers no insight, no dissection. He simply lets the piece speak for itself. He recognizes the impact that objectivity can have here.

In another piece, Rian recognizes the value that some personal insights can offer, so he breaks down some of the recent decisions at Twitter, interjecting his own subjective thoughts into their design process. Had he stuck with the facts, the piece is not nearly as useful.

This is the line we must walk, and I’m convinced that it is not only a remarkably difficult line to toe, but it is the litmus test of a true writer: he who masters the use of these two extremes is a craftsman. Whether the text requires complete subjectivity, complete objectivity, or a deft mixture of the two, it is what transforms the mediocre read into the words that find a home in our soul, never to let go.

Keyholes & Skydiving

Brad Leithauser once took a road trip, during which his child proceeded to school him on the art of living.

While driving home from a wedding, he and his family listened to a recorded book. At its end, the entire family seems quite content, basking in the satisfaction one feels after having finished a good story. They had come to its edge, its boundary, its end.

Not all of them felt the edge. Leithauser’s fifteen-year-old daughter thought nothing of the boundary, of the end, and in her mind, the story continued.

But what was Rachel really like?

Leithauser’s answer, as one would expect from a teacher of undergraduates, stressed the intentional ambiguity that a masterful author employs. He gave the reasoning behind such ambiguity- and his daughter would have none of it.

O.K., but what do you think Rachel was really like?

Leithauser then realized that he and his daughter were approaching the story from two wildly different viewpoints: that of the box and of the keyhole:

Had I been still more articulate, I might have said that there’s a special readerly pleasure in approaching a book as you would a box. In its self-containment lies its ferocious magic; you can see everything it holds, and yet its meagre, often hackneyed contents have a way of engineering fresh, refined, resourceful patterns. And Emily might have replied that she comes to a book as to a keyhole: you observe some of the characters’ movements, you hear a little of their dialogue, but then they step outside your limited purview. They have a reality that outreaches the borders of the page.

The parallels here were more than I could ignore. I began to think of the ‘keyhole’ approach and to what other realms it might be applied.

I thought of creators- those of us who tend to think of life merely as an opportunity to create things. Writers, designers, craftsmen of all sorts. The one thing, it seems, that we all have in common is the keyhole approach.

Most look at the world as a box: it is what you see, and the established boundaries and rules need not be expanded upon. The average person will see a coffee table as nothing more than a coffee table. A designer will see a coffee table as an opportunity, a limited vision of what a coffee table may be. Then he imagines what might lie beyond his field of vision: he imagines what else a coffee table might be.

Writers take a similar approach to people. Where most see a person as the limited sum of the parts that they see- he is a baker who enjoys movies- the writer imagines what might lie in his depths. Perhaps he dabbles in cryptography, dreamed of being a baseball player as a child, and secretly chastises himself for not being the man his father was.

This keyhole approach little more than a capacity to be amazed. As an adult looks out on the night stars and sees nothing more than stars, a child, whose capacity to be amazed has not been narrowed by the mundanity of the world, will see millions of angels shining flashlights.

When most pick up an iPad and see it as an opportunity to browse Facebook, some will marvel at the fact that they can strike up a conversation with an astronomer in Holland.

It is those with the capacity to be amazed that create the future of our world, because to be amazed is to see what might be, and only when we see what might be can we make what might be.

Not coincidentally, our capacity for happiness, for fulfillment also lies in our capacity for amazement. Stopping to smell the roses is a habit only of those who choose the keyhole approach. I will not wonder at the astounding person my daughter is becoming by looking at life as a box.

Say I were to find myself in a restaurant, alone. Next to me, a man sips his beer, quietly. The box approach tells me that there’s nothing more to see here- this is simply a man drinking a beer. The keyhole approach might cause me to wonder what brought this man here on this night, and I may strike up a conversation. Perhaps we’ll become the best of friends, and he will one day talk me into my first skydiving lesson and take me to a ballgame to take my mind off of the fact that I walked my only daughter down the aisle the day before.

Perhaps not. Perhaps he’s an asshole. If I look at life as a box, I’ll never know.

kat-in-a-grey-hat:

Words.

The Old Man (A Short Story)

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The old man looked expectantly down the street, and, seeing nothing, turned back to his cup of tea.

Five dollars this tea had cost him, but it was worth it, not only for its quality- it was exceptional- but for the visitor that cup of tea would bring.

Again, he turned to look down the street, then, noticing his exposed wrists, pulled the sleeves of his oversized parka to hide them. There was a time when he had been ashamed of those wrists, of their slender proportions, but no longer. He was too old for such self-consciousness. No, now he was simply cold.

He looked around at the other guests. Most were in power suits, and sipped their lattes as if oblivious to the world around them. The old man did not envy them their youth. He knew at what price it came, and would not relinquish his years of experience for their tight-skinned assurance.

He grasped the tea cup with both hands to warm them. It was, indeed, a cold January day, and the wind was balmy. The luxurious red velvet curtains of the cafe rippled slightly, and the old man briefly smiled, thinking that even luxury must still bow to the whims of nature.

He grasped the cup again, thawing his frozen hands, then set it gently down and ran his now warm fingers down the length of his face. Like his wrists, his abnormally large nose had once caused him grief. His fingers traced the deep wrinkles that now dominated his face.

It was unusual for her to be late, but he was not a man to worry. Besides, it had been a long time since he’d seen her. Perhaps she’s lost the capacity for punctuality since then.

He thought of her often, and he thought of her now. He briefly touched the white kopiah on his head, thinking of how ridiculous she’d considered it, never passing an opportunity to ridicule him, although good-naturedly, for it.

She was just a girl when he’d started wearing kopiahs, after a business meeting with a Malaysian man had presented one as a gift. He wasn’t Muslim, but it gave him a certain comfort, and had worn them since.

He realized now that people were staring. He was not one of them, and they were beginning to notice the outsider. Let them stare, he thought. I am here for a purpose. You will not make me leave, no matter how penetrating your stares.

He pulled a newspaper from his pocket, laying it out on the table before smoothing it, then finally folding it carefully to reveal the crossword section, already half-filled in.

This, too, made him think of her- the Sunday mornings by the fire, a father using the New York Times crossword as a conduit to teach his daughter the ways of the world, or perhaps just as an excuse to spend some time with her. She was young then, and uncomplicated. How much easier that had been.

Twenty-one across: “Benjamin’s love in ‘The Graduate.”

These had gotten a bit easier over the years, he thought.

He thought of that film, of the amazing performance of Dustin Hoffman. Then he thought of The Wizard of Oz, the first movie they’d ever watched together- at least, after she’d become old enough to sit through an entire movie without getting distracted. They had reenacted the story in the backyard, pitching tents for landmarks and laying down bags and bags of sand as the Yellow Brick Road. She had done the most awful Wicked Witch impression, which, of course, had been the most adorable thing he’d ever seen.

The reenactments always ended the same way: he as the tornado, whisking her back home to Kansas (or, in this case, the kitchen) to make peanut butter cookies.

The old man sighed.

He took another sip of tea, which was getting cold.

Two down: “neighborhood.”

Carefully, he wrote: C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y. He glanced again at the pen. He remembered Bobbie Kopecki, who’d stabbed her with a Bic pen on the schoolbus in third grade. She had shrieked in pain, the bus driver later told him, but then forced her lips shut and insisted that nothing had happened. She was okay.

She stifled the tears until she came home, and they came out in a flood as soon as she crossed the threshold. She had stood there, waiting for him to come to her. He had picked her up, setting her on his lap, and let her sob for two or three minutes without asking a single question. When her eyes dried, she told him what had happened, raising her skirt to show him the ink-stained bruise forming on the inside of her left thigh. He tended to the wound and took her out for ice cream, where he explained, for the first time, why good people do bad things.

The old man checked his watch.

It was a good watch, and for the longest time he’d avoided wearing it, out of defiance. It had been a gift from him on the old man’s sixtieth birthday.

He closed his eyes and imagined the wedding. A beautiful church on a warm Sunday morning, the sun’s rays bathing the church’s occupants in a sea of color as they burst through the stained glass depictions of so many ancient saints. She in her snow white gown, smoothing down the fabric that hugged her hips every time the nervousness seemed to be too much. The smile that had not left her lips since she’d awoken that day, betraying the happiness that would not be contained. The rose petals being strewn along the path that she was destined to walk by a rose-cheeked girl of about five, the daughter of her lucky groom.

He imagined every moment, as he must, for he had not been there to see it in person. For that, at least, his heart ached.

He remembered, too, the fight. She met him in the park for a Sunday picnic, and he had been excited to tell her of his recent promotion when she interrupted, telling him of her plans to marry.

The old man had objected. No one was worthy of his daughter, it was true, but he was especially unworthy. He defended criminals for a living, and when the criminals didn’t pay well enough, he chased ambulances. He seemed entirely too sure of himself- a sure sign of a man that’s completely unsure of himself- and never looked anyone in the eye while speaking. He had a weak handshake, and once, the old man had caught him treating his dog unkindly. A man who cannot treat a dog well cannot treat a woman well.

So, he had objected. He had mocked their love, telling her that it couldn’t possibly be real. She didn’t love him, could not possibly love that sort of man, and that was that.

She had cried. She had counted on her father’s blessing, and was shocked to see him withhold it. In the end, she had walked out.

Fourteen years later, he’d received the watch. He had stood in his doorway, staring at the package on the front porch for a long time, unable to move. Fourteen years of absence, and now the unmistakable handwriting on the package shook him. Finally, he picked it up, took it inside, and opened it carefully on the kitchen counter.

When he saw the watch, his face sagged, grew older. It was not a gift from her- it was a gift from him. She was of extravagant tastes, and this was an elegantly understated watch. She had always forced her elaborate sense of fashion on him, saying he should “spruce it up every now and then.” He resisted, but she never gave up. She would never give him a simple watch with a flat leather band. It was not her style.

He put the watch in the drawer of his nightstand, and didn’t see it again until one day when the pain began to dull, when it was no longer a pain, but an ache.

That day, he’d opened the drawer, and, for the first time, looped the watch around his thin wrist. He was truly an old man now, and needed to be reminded of the ache, needed to live with the pain that he’d caused.

Every morning since, he had donned the watch. Now the pain and the man were one: inseparable, indistinguishable. That unity had cost him everything: his position, his stature, his life. He’d let it all evaporate the day he became aware of how meaningless those things were.

The old man turned to look down the street. So many people were going about their lives. Soccer moms from Iowa drug their kids along behind them, trying desperately to fit all the sight-seeing into one day. Power brokers talked on their mobile phones, finalizing the deal that would finally get the attention of the boss. Teenage girls stared into window shops, desperately wishing that their bodies could more closely resemble the perfection of the mannequins.

The old man turned back to his tea to find the waitress standing above him.

“Sir, are you waiting for your daughter?”

“Yes,” said the old man. “I am.”

“I’m afraid she’s not going to be able to make it. She just left the message with a member of our staff.”

She pretended not to notice the heartbreak in his face, and instead offered to refill his cup.

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll be going now.”

And with that, the old man slowly stood, zipped his parka, and started down the sidewalk on the long journey home.

This story was inspired by this photo.