The internet is to human interaction as Pringles are to potatoes. Companionship and closeness are processed into an unrecognizable slurry, then reconstituted as an unnatural recreation of their original incarnation. We start as social creatures, isolate ourselves into small rooms writhing with power strips, then make friends with similarly sequestered people, trying to re-create the very communities we're avoiding.

There are a lot of people I genuinely like whom I've never met in person. I care about them, at least enough that if they got arrested I'd gladly PayPal them bail money. Nonetheless, here's something I will never say: "Wow, this party is so great, it's almost as cool as a message board!" Even I am not capable of that level of sarcasm, and I'm a professional sarcast.



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With this in mind, I'm not sure why I keep trying out new social networking sites. The very term social networking gleams with utilitarian smarm. If you're the sort of person who will go home in the middle of a shindig and/or gala to pick up more business cards, you're a social networker – congratulations, leave me alone.

Really, any verb construct that doesn't lend itself to the preterite tense should be considered with deep suspicion. "What did you do last night?" "I social networked! I networked socially! I found myself in a social situation, so I networked it!" If I can't substitute caroused, reveled or at the very least hobnobbed, then it's not the sort of social I want to network anyway.

Still, I feel obligated to keep up with the cutting edge of web communities, which generally means I just sign up with anything Jason Kottke tells me to. That's how I got involved with Twitter.

Twitter takes the Pringles analogy to its logical conclusion. It's something like a collection of personal blogs, only each entry is limited to 140 characters, so you end up with a vertical stack of bite-size, artificially flavored communication snacks. They're oddly compelling while remaining staunchly unsatisfying, and it always feels like maybe the next one will quell the roiling ennui inside.

Like an elderly widow keeping the TV on for "company," I keep a Twitter window open whenever I'm online, and accept that as sort of, kind of communication. Over the course of my day I learn that Wil Wheaton enjoys the new B-52s album, Jonathan Coulton is taking a minivan cab and Kottke himself is having a "really crappy morning."

I think one reason Twitter leaves me unsatiated is that it asks the most boring question possible: "What are you doing?" Call up a friend and ask them what they've been doing lately and you might get an interesting response. Ask them what they're doing right now and you're almost guaranteed to get a boring answer: "Eating lunch." "Thinking about doing some laundry." That's because if they were seducing a Nobel Prize laureate or rescuing a baby from a burning submarine, they wouldn't have answered the phone.

Furthermore, the 140-character limit, while discouraging the sort of self-indulgent maxi-musings that characterize LiveJournal, ends up being too short for interesting topics, while remaining way too long for boring ones.

Boring: "I need a new shoelace. Well, I guess I need two. I don't want mismatched shoelaces."

Eighty-three characters, and already about 70 too long. I'd suggest shortening this to "I still exist."

Interesting: "I'm at Six Flags! It's Robot Day! I'm in the Bourbon-Bot line, and I'm behind Jeanne Tripplehorn! She just asked if I have any massage oil in m"

Insufficient.

Of course, I provide my own contributions to Twitter. I'm not some sort of Twitter-leech. What do I talk about? Hash browns, mostly. I'm keeping a running log of my attempts to cook the perfect hash browns. Seriously.

I must be stopped.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a socialite, a socialist and a sociopath.

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