The Empty Chamber of Online Intimacy
The addict knows not what he does, nor why he rages when confronted: so same is the user of the Internet.
I grew up with an experience of social media that I can only describe as stand-off-ish. These were the halcyon days of Myspace, before Mark Zuckerberg suckerberged billions of people into joining his drone network.
Myspace was gloriously stupid: with the lovely 90s-remnant of personal themes (usually consisting of web graphics that would flash and glitter across each person’s personal page). Say what you will: Myspace allowed for a lot of individuality.
And yet, I joined this service reluctantly, just as I joined Facebook reluctantly a few years later. All of my friends were crowding toward the excitement of these new platforms for community, but I came to the stage late, disgruntled by something that I could not (at least then) describe.
Human beings are communicative animals by nature. We live and breathe the art of speech and writing, the subtle nuances of body and scent and tone. A whole world might be made or broken on the artifacts of such interlocution.
Indeed, communication is a web of meaning, much too subtle to grasp at a conscious level. What’s even more confounding is that simply being good at…
