But who wants to be free on those terms? Often I am secretly happy to feel obliged; it gives me a reason to get out of bed, a sense that I matter. But consumer society is set up so that if I wanted, I could live my entire adult life without having anything but frictionless, emotion-free commercial interactions with other people, and I’m embarrassed to admit how seductive this can seem sometimes—particularly in the holiday season, confronted with the task of buying gifts for relatives I hardly see, with no idea of what they would really want. How much easier it would be to write them a check for the amount I was willing to spend, dispense with the pretense of a relationship, and reduce it to the level of commercial exchange. -- Rob Horning, PopMatters
I don't disagree with the logic here that tells us all what we already know: Facebook and similar Web 2.0 apps can enable us to fall into habits that seem very natural and yet also in some important fashion kind of subhuman. But the 'sense that I matter' which Horning identifies is the envious compliment of our prideful display of personal trivia online, and all the social networking sites in the world won't dull our desire to, y'know, really feel physically stuck with people. It pumps up our devotion to therapies of commitment that we already know are usually not satisfying for very long but occasionally great, like going to bars, concerts, and sports events.
And, while those 'thin' face-to-face interactions help facilitate, it also pumps up our devotion to therapies of brief commitment, microcommitments, fleeting encounters of shared physical and personal authenticity. In this way hooking up can be both incredibly empty and heavy with meaning, sometimes on the same occasion, to take just one example.
The good news is we can still have it both ways, even if we like to hang out on Facebook. The bad news is we can have it every which way and still wind up with nothing.
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