What would Emily Dickinson do with facebook? I wondered that yesterday when reading yet another staus update from a "friend." Once you join a social network you feel almost compelled to offer blow-by-blow descriptions of your everyday life - what music you are "currently listening to," your "status", your photos, your favorite this and that. If you never update you risk looking like the biggest bore in the blogosphere; if you once begin you can never stop.
I thought of Dickinson' while reading updates on what all my "friends" are currently doing, and feeling like I had better change my "status" soon lest people think I have spent the last seven days "waiting for someone to make me a cup of coffee", (which I sort of have, but that's the story of my life).
From my persepctive, grounded as I am in the last century, social utility networks are wonderful for seeing pictures of what distant friends and family members are doing, for dropping a quick note to a loved one far away, for instant encouragement and fun repartee, but they can easily turn people into frogs who tell their names, and the details of their everyday lives, and their most mundane thoughts the live-long June to the entire bog (which sounds curiously like "blog.") That's just what I think. I'll let Emily speak for herself.
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
by Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
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