It was Samuel Johnson who coined the word “clubbable” to describe social people—and, as importantly, also defined its opposite by describing himself as “a most unclubbable man.” This morning, with the tech blogs awash in the details of Google+ and, unavoidably, Facebook, I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost/benefit ratio of unclubbability. This is because I care about Google+ even less than Facebook—which means an actual negative number. So yes, all the Google+ coverage has forced me to confront my own unclubbableness at the top of the day.
Full disclosure regarding the primary feature of Facebook: If you haven’t heard from me in years, rest assured there’s a very good reason that has nothing to do with misplacing your contact information. Harsh, I know, but very true. After all, it’s the fucking Internet—if I wanted to say hi, I’d bang down a search string and find you. Unless, of course, you had no wish to be found, which—believe me—I can deeply respect.
More disclosure, this time about Google+ Circles: An occasional dinner with a couple of like-minded individuals? Sure, of course–why not? But joining a full-fledged community devoted to, well, anything? Oh, please . . . Unless it’s driven by a careerist need to network, what’s the upside beyond a tenuous sense of validation? Paul Brunton once said, “Study everything, but join nothing,” and I find myself in agreement. Nothing kills my intellectual passions faster than codification. Put another way, I need no guilds for my obsessions. For me, community is to interests what religion is to belief or zoos are to animals—which is to say, the same relationship that jam has to fruit.
I don’t want links to a Victorian studies groups adjacent to Electronica enthusiasts and JG Ballard scholars. Study everything, but join nothing: I’m a query-driven kind of guy, and, thankfully, the occasional tapping of groups isn’t the same as joining them. Wanting to know how many serialized parts there were to Dickens’ Little Dorrit in no way obligates me to attend a virtual cocktail party of obsessed Dickensians. I need the information, but after that I have better things to do.
With apologies to Bill Maher, I’d like to propose a New Rule—going forward, those tech bloggers espousing distraction-free applications and social networking can no longer do both. They must choose: Zen-like, minimal environments or Alicia’s-gallery-group-next-to-Fred’s-DJ-rankings-next-to-Linda’s-tattoo-clique (all of which I need on my desktop at all times because I have a panic attack if I can’t instantly arrange a gallery crawl that seamlessly segues into clubbing and an end-of-evening tat.) Think of it this way: If your lack of self-discipline necessitates specialized software to keep you focused, maybe you shouldn’t be cluttering your life with social networks—capice?
And yes, I realize this probably makes me Gregory House with no drug habit and a lot more sarcasm, and I’m more than okay that. (There are, after all, far worse things than scotch, not shaving, call girls and Mostly Being Right.) But that’s not the reason for this rant. Underlying the coverage of Google+ and Facebook there’s a distinctly evangelical zeal. Social Networking, it seems, is the One True Way and the only thing that remains is a fight over the superior way of doing it.
But when exactly did social networking win? I’m not talking about (or impressed with) the sheer number of people doing it. No—the question is how HiveMindism trumps personal investigation. If I’m already sneering at The New York Times bestseller list and Top Forty playlists, why would I need or want crowd-sourced guidance in, you know, more important areas of my life? If I’m already insulted when someone sends me a preprinted “letter” with their holiday card, why do I want to read the same one-size-fits-all stuff on Facebook? If I’ve never grasped how inline photos from near-strangers are a feature rather than intrusions, how is a unified hub for disparate platforms a good thing? And if, after dinner parties, I lean against the front door grateful that they’ve finally left, why would I want to trip over them again every time I’m online?
It’s important to understand I’m neither an digitial Luddite or out-of-touch with the bleeding edge of the interweb. Instead, I’m simply an online citizen in good standing who has consistently chosen, with the exception of Twitter, not to socially network. So the real question is whether or not there’s a downside to this? Am I less informed or less sophisticated or less pop-culturally astute or somehow hobbled in ways social networkers aren’t? Yeah, okay—you caught me—Rhetorical Question Alert. I give myself an A+ in all these areas. The fact is, the only downside I can think of to not being on Facebook is not getting first-dibs on Lucinda Williams tickets, and—sorry, Lu—one way or another, I’ll live . . .
Tech critics have recently been saying that competitors to the iPad have to answer the question “Why would I buy this rather than an iPad?” I’m similarly asking why I’d socially network instead of socially interacting with the messy real world just at the next corner? Thus far, the answers cite scale, distance, ease, convenience and time pressure—in short, pretty much everything that recommends prepared frozen food in lieu of a real dinner.
Would it surprise you to know that I also don’t eat prepared frozen food?
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