
Mademoiselle, March 1953
Photograph: Mark Shaw
This has nothing to do with knitting, but it's been preying on my mind lately. I hate blogs where the author goes on and on about the minutia of their lives, airs the dirty laundry, babbles on about too many personal details, etc, etc. And I'm not going to do that. I'm just not going to talk about knitting right now.
I've noticed that recently, my e-mail inbox has been, well, pretty empty, except for offers to try new lipgloss at Sephora, and the like, all of which I keep trying to unsubscribe to, unsuccessfully. But real e-mails -- those daily/weekly/monthly e-mails from my dearest friends? They're not there anymore. Not even annoying mass e-mails with links to things I've already read. (Because, you know, I'm literate too, and read the New York Times/The New Yorker/Salon/Vanity Fair/etc., just like you do.)
So, what's with The Mystery of the Missing Missives? I'm going to chalk it up to Facebook/Twitter/Myspace, where, apparently, chatting with your best friend is the same as sending out a one sentence status update to all 9,000 of your acquaintances at once. The ultimate mass e-mail, reduced to 134 characters. I may know what one of my friends is currently watching on the telly, but do I know how they are? No. Do I even know where they are these days? No. Because my attempts at real e-mail go unanswered. Do they know what I've been up to? It seems highly doubtful. I could drop dead the second this posts, and not a soul would know. Unless, of course, someone wondered why my Facebook status update hadn't been updated in a few months.
This bothers me. I don't like people much, so I can deal with not socializing in person. (Plus, being a shut-in, that's sort of out of the question, anyway.) I miss the joy of getting a Real Letter in my box at boarding school and college, but I can cope with e-mail. What I can't cope with is "Watching Real Housewives of East Podunk!!!!!! WOOT!!!!!" ("26 people like this"), and there it stops.
I don't believe that social networking sites are The Work of The Devil, but I do believe that, ironically, that despite the overload of ways in which to communicate with others we have these days, our society is perilously close to a breakdown of actual communication -- "What we have here is a failure to communicate," to quote the scary sunglassed guy in Cool Hand Luke. (Insert menacing southern intonation.)
I doubt I'll ever hear anything more from my friends ever again, other than a daily Facebook status update. So, I'll know what sports team they're rooting for. That they baked a loaf of bread. A-tisket, a-tasket, they're off to Kroger's with a red and yellow basket. But I won't know how they are, really, nor they I. And I think that's a rather sad thing. Maybe even worse than going AWOL entirely. (Which, as we all know, is THOR.)
But I guess while I'm not writing to friends, I'll have more time to knit.
So this post is about knitting after all.