The progress of civilization enables each one of us to manifest unsuspected virtues or new vices, which make us either dearer or more unbearable to our friends. (from Sodom and Gomorrah)
Here Proust is referring to the telephone, though he might have been speaking of Facebook or Twitter. On the one hand, we are increasingly distracted by technology and the 24/7 nature of the information age. We text while crossing the street, missing the small things that make up our world: eye contact with the alluring stranger who passes us for the first and the last time of our lives, the sight of a gaggle of school girls in uniform, an elderly woman inching her way to the other side. We practice the release of TMI ("too much information") on a regular basis so that everyone on Facebook knows that we committed such and such transgression. It's hard not to blurt it all out on our blogs and Facebook pages. (I'm sure I've sunk many a ship with my own loose lips.) Where is the mystery? Where is communication as an art form, slowly dealt out card by card, instead of tipping our hand from the start? Where is the seduction that takes place at the beginning of both friendships and romantic entanglements?
On the other hand, I recently heard that a young father in Egypt has named his newborn "Facebook" in honor of the truly unsuspected virtue of the social network in the Egyptian revolution.
So with all of these new vices--the very things that isolate us in a non-stop stream of information that makes our immediate surroundings so much less vivid and robs us of pockets of silence--we are also better able to please our "friends" and unite in a wave of protest, crying, "Together, united, we'll never be defeated!"
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