The Anti-Social Socialite

It is a long running joke between my friends that in the event of an emergency Branden is not the person to call because he'll either miss the call or not return it. The other part of that joke is that the best way to reach Branden if something is important is to tweet him.

There are probably a few factors that influence why I'm not a great phone person. I would argue that the fundamental reason why is that I'm antisocial and it has been influenced by the growth of other means of communication. But how does that really make sense if I'm always on the phone for work, texting, and browsing the many social networks I belong to? How can I really be antisocial if almost half of my tweets or pictures show me with a group of people at a party? How can I be antisocial if I just tweeted you about the phone call I missed?

And here lies my problem as well as the problem of many within my generation: our reliance of social media and technology has placed the actual conversation and the conveying of human emotion to the back burner. The logic of "I'm a social person because I've updated and invited everyone to look at all of my moves and life updates without direct communication" is flawed. Instead, we've relied too heavily on our social network to peer into the lives of our friends without actually being there physically.

Have you ever felt drowned in the sea of tweets, facebook statuses, text messages and instant messages? Technology has made communication effortless and efficient - all at the expense of actually communicating with others. We no longer have to be in a room to say what we feel to the person of our dreams because we can email it. We no longer need to hear the voices of our friends to know that they've had a horrible day because they can choose to tweet it. And scheduling time to see a movie with a friend? Well now you can doodle it and find the most efficient time that works for all without ever having to really speak.

For some of us, we've accepted the belief that our friendships and other relationships are static and these can be held together a series of well placed text and tweets. In my last relationship, one of my biggest faults is that I didn't place enough attention to being on the phone and cultivating trust, communication and such. AIM and Blackberry messenger cannot replace the sound of the voice on the other end of the phone. With text and technology, we've given ourselves an escape route from the responsibility of being there. Instead, we can pop in and out of each others lives as easily as sending a direct message.

Don't get me wrong, I love technology. I consider myself a techie: a person who is in tune with the latest and most up to date tech news. And for many of us who are scattered across the globe and across time zones and having our precious time consumed by work, a text or a quick conversation may be all that we have. But in the age of instant messaging and real time updates, I miss actually having conversations. But for many, technology has killed the social experience and I realize now that I've signed my own social death certificate.

Spending time texting, tweeting, facebooking, etc has diminished the social skills for many instead of providing a chance to promote and expand the social lives of our friends. While it allows for us to maintain those fragile bands of friendship across distance and time, it does very little to salvage the interpersonal relationships that we all crave (even me, a self described emotional cyborg).

For me, it seems as if my only social interactions are those facilitated by Twitter or Facebook and as a result my social life suffers. How can you be in the moment with friends while cultivating hundreds of friends and followers? Because life doesn't consist of contrite 140-160 character conversations and quips, I've almost forgotten what happens in a real conversation. A sense of humanity and "personableness" dies as we reduce our friendships into "friendships" and followers.

Which brings me back to the original crutch of this entry: my persistent need to tweet and comment has taken away from actually making friends. As much as I hate looking at the person at the club who's deep into their phone, I've also become that person - only I'm commenting on that persons actions or texting another friend who isn't at the club, checking out of the surroundings and involvement.

Ultimately, the short answer to this is for me and others to pick up the phone and instead of typing to actually talk. Instead of commenting on a status, I need to look a person in the eye and make a comment. In a sense, the ease and efficiency of technology hasn't helped me evolve fully. Technology has in a sense made me a form of "The Wizard" from "The Wizard of Oz": a man hiding behind a screen with a created image.