I remember the first time I got online, typing commands into Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3 to establish a dialup connection over our single phone line. From that moment onward our house answering machine message was effectively modem sounds—I kept a computer online as much as possible. Even when I was nowhere near the computer, I liked the idea of being connected (of course, much to my dismay, phone calls both incoming and outgoing were constantly kicking me off).
These days, I coexist with the internet as a kind of hybrid organism, my creeping tendrils simultaneously invading multiple domains. My belated acquisition of a smartphone has only strengthened this relationship. It’s not so much about actually “being online” constantly, but about having the freedom to access the information regardless of my current physical and temporal location.
Another big strength of our increasingly connected world is being able to maintain contact with people around the world. As a kid I used to write letters to my friends and participated in penpal services to meet people in other parts of the world and talked to a few select friends on the phone. The internet lessens the effect of meatspace restrictions like distance and time, allowing me to both make and maintain friendships where doing so would otherwise have been unlikely.
Where this goes awry is with people who are particularly disinclined to use modern means of communication (I’m looking at you, high school friends). When people don’t instant message (be it through AIM, GChat, or Facebook), or even regularly check their email, what remains? Letters are ineffective as people frequently move from place to place, and even with the correct address things mysteriously fail to arrive. There’s the telephone, but calling someone takes actual time and planning—a block has to be set aside to have a conversation, whereas a chat can be impulsive and even asynchronous, as both people go about their day doing other things. As a result, as much as I would like to have a more active friendship, I end up being a mere observer of their Facebook updates, pausing every so often to click “like.”
You may remember the great social purge from a while ago, where I deleted everybody from my Facebook friends list and slowly added them back, sorting them into groups as I went. It was my attempt to wrest a more granular control over my digital connections than Facebook seemed ready to allow. I recently got invited to Google+, where sorting these various connections has been elevated to a central role (with a drag and drop interface!), rather than being bolted onto a sub menu of options.
For many, such sorting seems to be about keeping others from seeing certain updates amid the constant refrain of privacy. While I believe privacy is important, I personally try not to put anything online that I’m not comfortable with the rest of the internet seeing. Rather, when I sort friends into groups it is to keep others‘ updates from reaching me. My ideal situation, as of yet unrealized on both Facebook and Google+, is to generate a pre-distilled feed of information from only the connections I value the most, relegating the rest of the chaff to a bin I can attend to or ignore at my leisure.