my twitter is dead. my myspace is terminally ill. my facebook is fake. after 10+ years of being a social networking glutton: i am full. i can't eat another bite.
it's the end of an era for me. the internet provided me with a non-physical space to express myself and experience a camaraderie with my contemporaries that was lacking in my life in my teens and early twenties. myspace changed my life in so many ways; i discovered there were many kindred spirits all over the world that thought, dressed and felt like me, i found music that i never would have heard on the radio, i made friends online that became friends offline, i found love.
but now this social networking lark feels too fragmented. now it feels too time-consuming. now it feels too demanding to ensure my online representation is in alignment with who i am, or how i'm feeling, or what i'm doing 'right now'. now lol's and omg's feel empty. it's not fun anymore. there was a time when three days without the internet would have had me feeling lost, my life was on there you see; but when i shut my computer down...i effectively shut my life down. i didn't have the social life i felt i had; what i did have was an incredibly powerful illusion of a social life which i clung to with steadfast might. but even air can begin to feel heavy in a tightly clenched fist.
this is not about anybody else, just me. i have no position on what internet usage says about you and your life, i can't possibly know. i'm sharing this partly because people have asked me why i shut my twitter down, and partly because this unpacking of my thoughts is cathartic. be clear though, i do not hate the internet, far from it. i don't know who i'd be or who i'd know if i wasn't given the gift of dial up at 16 yrs old. i'm indebted to those that laid the tarmac on this information super-highway that has been so good to me for so long. but today, 'right now', i don't feel compelled to drive on it like i used to.
i work with people that i adore, that i laugh with all day long. i talk to new people every day, communicating with eye contact and facial expressions instead of emoticons. i call my friends on the phone and meet them for dinner and a movie instead of seeing them in my buddy list every day but not seeing them for months. i no longer want to create pages about who i am that force me to consider how i look to an imagined audience, i just live for me.
so this is now my only internet home. i am in the process of setting up a tumblr for my fiction work [i'm soooooooo excited!], but this is the only place i will use to share my thoughts. i'm still not sure why this blog has survived my internet shutdown spree, but i am sure it will be revealed to me in time.
so it turns out that the internet was unable to give me what i really wanted, and that what i have now is more than i secretly believed possible. consequently, you can no longer find me in the tweets, because i'm in the london streets [corniness intact]. my posts may be sparse, but my life is plentiful. it's kind of weird. i guess a broken compass will still guide you somewhere: and i guess i am here.
farewell social networking, i won't brb :)
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