means vs. media
All day I’ve been collecting reactions to this. While many agree that the pursuit of ceaseless, uninterrupted connectivity is “for the poor” I think Sterling may have spoken too quickly. As Heffernan points out at the very end of the article–the main difference between us regular folk and the supremely wealthy is time.
You see, the celebrities and CEOs of the world are just as plugged in is the rest of us, however, they are able to hire assistants to tweet for them, thus, they are able to mull around in their private, West Village rooftop gardens while the rest of us are busy screaming our own names at the bog with our keyboards.
Money may not be able to buy love or happiness, but it sure as shit can buy you free time.
So many struggling 20 and 30-somethings such as myself find ourselves spread professionally and emotionally thin attempting to keep up with the rat race while simultaneously producing personal work and maintaining friendships. The problem for us is that our personal work doesn’t pay [yet] so we are forced to take jobs we don’t love in order to pay rent and eat food. The only way to pursue our own projects and ideas and stay alive inside our 40+ hour work weeks is to avail ourselves of the wealth of personal marketing tools at our disposal
Twitter has already become an obligation for countless employees at hundreds of PR firms and media machines around the known universe–and this includes the personal marketing entourages of celebrities.
But the idea that “you only care about your virtual network if you’re poor because it makes you feel more important than you are” is grossly incorrect.
I have friends without cell phones, who have never joined myspace, never owned a personal computer (yes, these people still exist). These are all choices these people have made for various reasons–and these choices are far easier to make if you are wealthy. If you are wealthy people will seek you out anyway, but if you are not, you have to make yourself available or no one will know you exist. It’s just a fact. Why Heffernan’s article worries me is that I can already hear people interpreting it as an advocation of a “personal analog hermitage” —already tres chic in certain circles, but only practical if you can afford it (you know, like voting for Bush and citing his tax cuts by way of explanation).
Whenever any new medium is invented, there will always be several hundred years’ worth of resistance to it. Socrates HATED a newfangled medium known as the written word, and preferred to do all his work verbally. How do we know this? Because Plato wrote down his master’s conversations.
Look at that list I just made of things friends of mine have learned to live without–cell phones, social networks and computers. While the newest of the 3, social media, may seem like a ridiculous burden to you, what would you do without your computer? Your cell phone? I guarantee that you have come to accept that you cannot live without at least 1 of those 3 items. In 5 years there will be new media which will be so annoying it will have eclipsed Twitter and all of its critics will have shifted their focus to it, leaving Twitter to be accepted as the norm. If you want to put money on this I will totally take bets.
Resistance to media almost always begins with the wealthy, mainly because the spread of new media=the spread of knowledge. The wealthy like to maintain a monopoly of knowledge because knowledge is power. I know that sounds cliche and slightly socialist, but do your research. The Catholic Church hated the letterpress in the beginning because they feared the availability of books and widespread literacy would mean an end to unbridled accord with their particular interpretation of the Bible. Voltaire, champion of intellectual idealism, would not let his servants into his salon during his discussions (you know, ‘lest they get any lofty ideas). In many ways their fears were completely founded.
Those of us who are poor [sic] , are obligated to maintain our own networks, for our own advancement, because we can’t afford to pay anyone to do it for us. For me, that means twitter and facebook. For some, all it means is email and texting. For others, it just means talking to an assistant who will tweet, text and type for you.
That said, a glass of wine with friends and a record playing in the background is something we all need to schedule into our lives. The time is there, most of us are just not wealthy enough to do it all day.
This past Saturday, New York was 74 degrees and delightfully sunny. I spent it in the park with friends I invited to join me and friends who happened to walk past. On a day like that you don’t need a cell phone if you know which park your circle will flock to. These are times to be savored. Everything in moderation, the internet can wait a day or two for you, but cutting it out altogether at this point is just stupid.