Tweet, Tweet
Posted by Elizabeth
For whatever reason, I have had a hard time jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. As an extrovert who loves to dish and rehash the details of my life, Twitters seems like it should be right up my alley. Facebook certainly is. So it was with interest that I read Peggy Orenstein’s article “I Tweet Therefore I Am” in The New York Times Magazine, in which she argues that the advent of social networking media has turned us from an internally-focused culture to an externally-focused one in which “your psychology becomes a performance.” (As someone with both a theatre and psychology background, I find this fascinating.) Not long after stumbling upon Orenstein’s piece I read Katrina Kenison’s blog post “The Swallows,” in which she mulls over many of the same questions and quandaries that Orenstein poses. Namely, that in our efforts to record our attempts to live in the moment, do we cease to live in the moment? She notes the irony by saying, “I earn my living by writing about being in the moment. And I do so by sitting in front of my laptop, typing words onto a screen.”
When I think about what it means to live my life “in pencil,” one of the first things that springs to mind is living a life that is intentional and conscious, one in which I am both engaged in the day-to-day happenings of the world around me while taking time to reflect upon how those happenings are effecting me. And the method in which I typically choose to reflect is through writing via online media. “But,” in the words of Orenstein, “when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight?” I can’t help wonder what I’m missing in my everyday life via the process of writing about my everyday life. I wonder if there are other ways that I could be reflecting upon my experiences without writing about them.
Oh, and the fact that I’m sending out this post via Twitter? The irony isn’t lost on me.
What do you think: does conveying your experience take you out of the moment or help deepen the experience? What other ways can we reflect upon our lives without making them a “psychological performance?” Are you a Twitter fan?
August 13th, 2010 at 6:21 am
I was recently at a conference with a bunch of coworkers and it was driving me CRAZY that they were all constantly checking their phones for email, facebook, etc. It seemed so sad that we were at these very nice dinners together and instead of engaging with each other everyone was reaching out to someone or something in the ether. I’m a little bah, humbug to all the new technology but have to admit to being a compulsive facebook checker if I’m on the computer.
August 13th, 2010 at 7:32 am
Great post, Elizabeth. I missed that article, but I’ll be sure to check it out. I think there are two important aspects of this topic.
1. How does the process of constantly providing play-by-play affect the way we live our lives. I think the potential damage to introspection is important. Presumably our lives should not be a performance and if we are not accountable to ourselves then what?
2. To piggy-back off of Anne B’s comment, how does all of this social media affect the way we interact in real life. By constantly checking Twitter, FB, and e-mail while with other people at some level we are sending the message “I need to see if there’s something more interesting or important than YOU that needs my attention.
That second one can take a number of forms, not just social media. We’ve all had the experience of being at a cocktail party and the person you’re talking to is scanning the room to see if there’s anyone else they’d rather interact with. In a similar vein, once several years ago I drove a few hundred miles to visit a friend during a hard time. During my visit we drove from her small college town to a larger city to do some shopping. On the drive she pulled out her cell phone and said, “Well, who can we call and talk to?” I was crushed. I just sat there thinking, “Um, well, we haven’t seen each other in more than a year and I just drove almost 400 miles to come see you. Maybe you could talk to me?” But I didn’t have the courage to say it. She dialed up another friend of ours and I sat there staring out the window while they caught up.
Moments like that happen more and more these days and it will eventually be damaging to real world relationships.
October 3rd, 2010 at 1:06 am
I am truly baffled by society’s new found need to over share their lives in cyberspace, ‘tweeting’ every banal moment of their existence. I understand those who wish to sell something or want to disseminate information en masse using a social network to achieve their goals, but I am intrigued about the rest.
Social networking on paper looks good, selling itself as a tool to potentially connect globally, but does this threaten the success of human face to face relationships, or does this make them better because we have released, anonymously, our true emotions through the process of writing.
I am not a ‘twitter’ fan, but I do encourage blogging; for me, an online journal encourages introspection and accountability. Communicating my experiences certainly does help deepen them and recording those moments of joy and confusion helps me achieve better understanding and clarity. Perhaps it might further serve to help and inspire others on their paths.
To answer Orenstein’s question, perhaps for some, true insight comes in a process of externalized introspection. People have been keeping diaries and journals for centuries, well before the invention of cyberspace, and with the increasing popularity of Blogs, it looks the the need is still there.
You ask in what other ways can we reflect upon our lives without making them a psychological performance? Simply, by taking the time to appreciate those ordinary moments and realizing how extraordinary they really are. Savor the lessons those moments bring. Practicing gratitude removes you from a self-centered existence and the world would be a less traumatized and kinder place if we all did a little more of it.