“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

Image Credit... Kevin Van Aelst

Twitter is no longer new. It’s nearly three years old. Early enthusiasts who used it for barhopping bulletins have cooled on it. Corporations, institutions and public-relations firms now tweet like maniacs. Google has been rumored to be interested in buying the company. The “ambient awareness” that Twitter promotes — the feeling of incessant online contact — is still intact. But the emotional force of all this contact may have changed in the context of the economic collapse. Where once it was “hypnotic” and “mesmerizing” (words often used to describe Twitter) to read about a friend’s fever or a cousin’s job complaints, today the same kind of posts, and from broader and broader audiences, seem . . . threatening. Encroaching. Suffocating. Twitter may now be like a jampacked, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined “ambient awareness” to describe this sense of physical proximity) but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.

A typical hour on my Twitter account, which I use to follow the updates of about 250 people, has some wonderfully cryptic tweets from Murray Hill, a drag-king entertainer, and Touré, the novelist and critic, alongside some less-inspired posts from P.R. people and cultural institutions trying to pass as normal Twitterers. I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious. But don’t get me wrong: I’m also just shouting my name the livelong June to a subscribing bog.