Going to sleep alone
צילום: Jupiter
Much buzz, no substance
Google Buzz's launch prompts Zoheret Cohen to think about our social life in modern world
On Feb. 10, 2010, Google festively launched Google Buzz in Israel.
The day started routinely in fact; people got up in the morning, drank their coffee, checked their Facebook, created a new status line for Twitter, looked through a few emails, and even briefly chatted with friends on the Messenger, but then out of nowhere, Google decided to step up.
Once the decision was taken, everything happened quickly. Anyone entering a Gmail account in the afternoon was offered the opportunity to start using Google Buzz. But what the hell is Google Buzz? Oe asks. Well, it's an innovative online feature, sort of like Twitter; it latches on to your email contact list and gives you the option to monitor others, update a status line, share your experiences, etc.
Wow, that sounds cool, says the average Israeli. Is it free? Totally free. No charge, my man. Just confirm it, and it's all yours.
Very cool, says average Joe. I've got Facebook, I've got Twitter, I've got Gmail, and now I've got Google Buzz. He goes into his email – but what now? Well, Google doesn't quite have an answer for this, just like Facebook or Twitter have no answer. All of them provide us with amazing infrastructure for a virtual social life, yet they do not provide us with the substance.
We are the ones tasked with producing the substance and making friends. And so, we get to work (after all, how could it be that I've been on Facebook for a year and a half now yet only have 183 friends to show for it? It probably means something is wrong with me…so what was the name of that guy, the one in my marketing class two years ago? Let's do it, add him to the list. And his buddies too, just for the hell of it.)
And so, we accumulate more friends, including some celebrities or semi-celebrities who agreed to confirm us as their friends. It makes us feel worthy. We keep in touch with people who studied in elementary school with us without ever exchanging any words. Even if they delete us we won't feel it, but for the time being, let's keep them there.
Every morning, we try to re-invent ourselves in our status line. When we fail to come up with a sentence that is witty and impressive enough, we just quote an ancient Chinese proverb or some words from a poem, just as long as we don't leave that line empty.
Big swamp of shallow small-talk
We develop informal relationships of "response and counter-response," the modern-day version of scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. We don't really care what that guy wrote in his blog, just like he doesn't care about the last sentence I invented on Twitter, as long as we're responding to each other and creating wild and lively social dynamics.And what do we do when we are too tired to respond? We make do with liking all sorts of things. We give the thumbs up to that photo of the neighbor's dog, as well as that banal status line written by Moe four hours ago, and to the YouTube clip uploaded simultaneously by 20 friends - even though we didn't even bother watching it. We're just filled with endless love and approval to the world, so why should we care about saying we like all sorts of things, when all it requires of us is to press a little key?
We have an iPhone, a cell phone, a laptop, ICQ, a blog, an up-to-date profile in every major social network, and plethora of real and fictitious mailboxes that provide us with every possible way to make contact and share information. However, we quickly discover that we no longer have any real messages to pass on.
Once upon a time we would send, in the mail, one real and perceptive letter written in dense hand-writing and filled with insights about life and our worldview; today, we send 17 times a day kitschy PowerPoint presentations featuring sunset images (that we did not even photograph), silly jokes, chain letters, and short scenes from our favorite TV shows.
We sink into a big swamp of virtual, shallow, and artificial small-talk coupled with nonsensical chatter that is empty of any meaning, created for the purpose of providing forced substance to all these monstrous media that keep on developing much faster than we need them to.
We've lost the meaning of real conversation; we've lost the meaning of real company.
We'll be feeling very popular if one random morning we open our mailbox and discover 22 new messages; we'll be feeling quite socially active if we organize a mass Messenger party at 2 am. We'll find strength by looking at icons of hugs and flowers, after we poured our heart out (under some bogus nickname) at some remote online forum; we'll be flattered if we get a personal message from some anonymous figure letting us know that we write really, really well.
All of this virtual clatter will overcome us with a deceptive and sweet feeling of togetherness – yet at the end of the day, we'll go to bed all alone.
