The asocial Web says thanks, but no thanks

There’s irony somewhere in the juxtaposition of the arrival in the mail a couple of days ago of my newest beloved t-shirt, “Twitter is Useless,” and the arrival in my email inbox of Six Apart’s announcement of Twitter on digital growth hormomes: Action Streams!

Action Streams are a new feature, available now as a free plugin, which give you more control over the websites and profiles you use on the web.

Call it “unified social networking” — much like Facebook’s News Feed, or services like Friend Feed or Plaxo Pulse, Action Streams let you keep track of the things you do on over 75 services around the web. From adding favorites on Flickr to saving links on Delicious or Digg to posting videos on Vox or YouTube, all of your actions can be aggregated, displayed, and shared on your Movable Type-powered site. The Action Streams you publish can be for one person, or an aggregate of the actions by all of the authors on your site. And you have complete control over the privacy of those actions.

Okay, then!

Wow. I feel like I’m crouched in the shrubs under Byrne Reese’s rear window.

This really is social networking writ large, and for people who enjoy that sort of thing, more power to them. I’m not one of them, and why I’m not - considering that I’m communicating this by way of a, uh, blog - is worth a moment’s consideration.

I can’t blame age, exactly. People older than I am have Facebook and Myspace accounts and use them regularly. I have such accounts myself - in both cases prompted by a request by someone else - but I have used them exactly three times in a year and some change. I hope to log into them again only to delete those accounts.

I can’t even hide behind the claim of curmudgeonry, which - grouchy as it sounds - has a faint hard-earned quality to it, which harks back to age. No, I’m not a curmudgeon about networking so much as I am constitutionally less capable of it than others.

I am surprised to admit that I am rather an asocial being.

Not antisocial, I think. After all, this blog has an RSS feed - actually, several. They came with the template. Being antisocial denotes a fairly vigorous opposition to human contact, which frankly sounds like a lot of work. Of course, this implies that I’m simply lazy, which may or may not be true but is wholly immaterial here. Your correspondent is just kind of private…or as private as a person with a blog can reasonably be.

As I pause to figure out what to say next, I can sense a kind of inner Andy Rooney rising up within me, grumbling about all these people, young people mostly, Twittering amongst themselves, and isn’t that a good term for it, Twittering, chirping, not very substantial, idle chatter about some video they saw on the Web or how many lattes they had at lunch or…and then I slap him back down quick, because once you start talking like that, you very well might get stuck that way, and who wants that?

And setting Rooney’s problems aside, this isn’t about other people and their networking. It’s about me, of course, and possibly about an ingrained, old-fashioned, mostly unidirectional view of communication, stemming from traditional models of publishing and the days of three major networks (and you were lucky to have ‘em!), and rotary, landline, heavy-as-sin telephones and other antiques.

Or it could be something as simple as this: I already have - right here, thanks - all the community I can handle.

Yeah. Yeah. It could be exactly like that.

Well.

Glad we had this little talk.

Note: Not that I wish 6A anything but good luck with this venture. I’d have been uncomfortable with it no matter whose brainchild it was.

Similar posts:
Had I known this, I wouldn’t have bothered
40-15, WordPress
The seven stages of upgrading
If (lastStraw) then (WordPress)
Movable Type 4