My Solipsistic Confession

Before many routine business meetings begin, there is usually some idle or humorous chitchat. Certainly it can fill the time needed to wait for important latecomers. But it probably has a more fundamental social function of putting everyone at ease, of establishing some personal connections. Maybe your lizard brain even gets involved by using it as a test to separate friend from foe, prey from predator.

At a meeting I went to yesterday afternoon, our preliminary chitchat suddenly and surprisingly focused on the topic of typing. SK started it off by saying that he wished that he could use his thumbs and pinky fingers while typing and that he was trying to retrain his brain and fingers to do so. I mentioned that a good friend of mine, a mutual acquaintance of the other two guys in the meeting, could type at light speed with only two fingers, and that it was quite a sight to see him go at it. BC sheepishly laughed and said that he had his wife type out important documents for him, not because he is sexist but because he can’t type at all. I said, ah, yes, the hunt and peck method. Then I said, I use all 10 fingers and never look at the keyboard. It’s the unexpected consequence of being forced to take a typing class back in junior high. I hated it then, thought it was unfair and stupid. Turns out that I learned an extremely valuable skill! SK then said, now smart phones are changing everything. Texting is usually done only with your thumbs, and virtual keyboards on some phones are so small that you can only use one finger at a time anyway. And we old-timers all had a good laugh at “those kids today.”

But the entire skit (and I am recalling it as a sort of comedic skit that we scripted out in advance) got me thinking about a topic that I often ponder: communication, and in this particular case, how technology is changing it. This afternoon I read an online discussion about whether personal blogs were a dying art (I don’t think they are; a topic for another time) and decided that was motivation enough to write this post.

So I proceeded to start another rant about the shallow, solipsistic, and derivative nature of FaceBook and Twitter, about the apparent inability of many people to sustain attention or even comprehension beyond 140 characters. I spun off into a related rant about how communication with virtual people belies a basic need of the social animal that we are to look our friends in the eye, see them, smell them, hear them. How else can we truly tell friend from foe?

Then I realized that I am as much a virtual entity to some of the whopping ten or so regular readers of CircusK9 as your FaceBook “friends” might be. I don’t pretend to be your friend but then again, I do sort of hope that you read my posts. In my desire to be read maybe I’m not that much different than someone who uses FaceBook to post repeatedly “look at me gazing at my navel.”

Except that I know how to touch-type using all 10 fingers and I always use more than 140 characters.