“I just dropped the biggest deuce ever.”
The words stare back at me from my LiveJournal’s friend page as I picture the comment’s poster. It’s Friday night. From my fourth floor window, I can hear the clicking of heels heading towards Hundo, yet somehow I’m reading (and thinking about) my Asian friend’s shit. I guess that this is true intimacy.
It took me approximately twenty minutes to break into my old Livejournal account, created in seventh grade when I still had a MySpace and thought it was cute to whine about my insecurities and my eighth grade formal dress on a public forum. I think at this point I also had an online boyfriend.
The entire idea seemed endearing in a You’ve Got Mail sort of way. No one really has time to regularly catch up with high school friends, save the harried between-class calls and occasional wall post. Hell, texting has almost replaced human interaction. So why not microblogging — online documentation of every little daily detail? Maybe a friends-only LiveJournal for a geographically separated clique could be the greatest technological innovation since T9. Maybe blogging would keep everyone on top of the basics so winter break catch-up sessions aren’t so impossible. Maybe we’d all feel less guilty that sometimes momentous occasions like new boyfriends and jobs slip by our radar. Or maybe we’d annoy each other until none of us gave a damn. So I asked a few of my friends I’d known practically since kindergarten to microblog with me. For fourteen days, I’ll be known as sarebear_xo. Cute, really cute.
At first, it’s a little strange. Kathryn* (all names have been changed), a sophomore at UMass Amherst, apparently ate a ton of Domino’s cheesy bread while she was high, and it made her weekend. Carolyn* really wanted pita bread, but then her left foot cramped, so she decided to forgo a trip to Whole Foods. I complained about the lack of sustenance in my sorority house and that I’ve been living off of a jar of peanut butter for eight days. At this point, I’m hungry, but no more enlightened than before. The posts seem menial and forced, like everyone is procrastinating or too shy to start a game of Telephone.
But in a few days, things get more intimate. Arielle tends to post random but juicy bits of her life peppered with bitching about how her paninis in New York cost $15. Her econ major response to the panic on Wall Street is probably one of my favorite entries: “I am shitting in my pants. My future is shitting in its pants. Shit. What are the Asians in this country going to do?”
Carolyn* was infamous in high school for her blunt, irreverent comments and hacking her red waist-length hair with kitchen scissors one night. Now she’s an art student in Boston, and apparently, sexually frustrated: “Fucking monogamy — Ok, I get laid regularly and cuddled with at the end of the day when I’m exhausted, and I’ll be really happy once it’s cold out I have someone to stay inside with, but I’m so far behind (in the number of people I’ve slept with)!” And a few days later: “We finished talking about things tonight because we basically realized we both felt exactly the same way and were both thinking, ‘This feels so right, but I’m afraid to be in a relationship again.’ So we decided to be together, and then had the most amazing sex ever.”
It’s sort of a relief — Carolyn is one of those people who doesn’t believe in Facebook relationship status, let alone marriage, so I wouldn’t have found out for a while otherwise. It was pretty awkward when she called me, cooing about the new beau, and I interjected, “Yeah, I read it online.”
That’s another phenomenon of microblogging. No one really provides context in the posts, mentioning their college friends as if we all know who they are. I can’t escape the feeling that we’re all living separate lives strung together by an online social experiment.
Towards the end, everyone has given up on writing anything political or remotely intelligent. This doesn’t make sense! We’re all smart women with the degrees-in-the-making to prove it! Do I really need to know that Kathryn is really upset that she accidentally dumped her macaroni in the sink? She’s been eating it daily for more than ten years.
Even after I ended my experiment in microblogging, I can’t really sort out my feelings about it. Part of me thinks it’s sad that interpersonal communication has literally gone to shit. Maybe as much as our egos or tuition payments suggest that we have a sincere interest in elevated theories and discourse, the only thing that really matters among friends are the mundane people, places and things in our lives. But I don’t want to depress myself further. So I deleted my journal and have decided to bitch about meaningless stuff in a more justifiable forum — Facebook.
The Daily Northwestern > The Weekly
Head First: Stream of Consciousness
Spending two weeks getting (electronically) close and (uncomfortably) personal
Published: Thursday, October 9, 2008
Updated: Saturday, October 10, 2009
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