"Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity" is how Heffernan describes her current Twitter entanglement with over 250 people (which in her case is at least partly for professional reasons). She reflects further:
The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!(There is a sweet irony to this Chicagoan that this comes from the New York Times since the last sentence echoes my opinion about the source of the love New Yorkers - and particularly Manhattanites - express for their place of residence.)
Twitter is only the latest development in the relentless and seemingly inexorable march toward greater population density and more frequent interaction. I'm reminded of Henry Thoreau's contention that "too frequent society leaves us overly familiar and uninteresting to one another."
My abode is anything but an isolated shack in the woods, but I think Thoreau understood something about a basic human tendency to substitute quantity for quality in our interactions. As long as we are immersed in a stream of chatter we are less likely to recognize that what we are consuming and producing is vapid and empty and crowding out people and activities of more substance.
