Friends,
Before I start in on this topic, I have about a million disclaimers to make. A few of them include the facts that:
- I love facebook
- I love my iPhone and its sundry features
- I check my email all the time (in fact, too many times)
- There's no actual recent example of texting (etc.) that is motivating this blog post, so no need to be paranoid or suspicious (unless you broke up with me in 8th grade via a note; you know who you are)
- I'm not writing this from some moral high ground. I'm writing it from a cocoon of blogging, texting, and emailing from which I rarely emerge
So don't read this as an attack on technology or social media. I'm not one of those oldfangled people griping about how smartphones and the internet have robbed us of face-to-face interactions with each other. I'll never advocate a long-term abandonment of facebook in order to free up more time for, um... honestly, I'm not even sure what else there is in life.
And yet, and yet...
The evils of written text
I was torn between "sundry" and "divers" in that last section, but I was worried you might think I meant "more than one diver"
There are just some things [apologies, confrontations, break-ups, rejections, and the like] that need to be communicated in person. Or, if not that, over Skype. In the absence of physical presence or video chatting, some form of telephone. But don't write it down. Don't ever write it down.
The problem is, written communication, in which you don't have to look a person in the eye, is just so much easier. And that, of course, is why we do it. In the face of something potentially scary or nerve-racking or unpleasant, we'd much rather communicate the words without actually saying them.
The problem with that problem is, people have dignity that demands personal, actual communication. When you need to make one of these communications, I think it's a pretty simple cost-benefit analysis:
the other person's need to be dignified as a human vs. my desire to be comfortable and/or save face
And honestly, I think it pretty much comes down to how selfish we are in that moment.
In sixth grade, it was easier to ask out girls in a note instead of in person or on the phone. So we sometimes did it that way. It must have been much, much easier for those girls to break up with us in a note, too. Because they often did it that way. In high school, when we were too old for notes but before texting had been invented, we sent our friends to tell people we were mad at them, or else did it over AIM. In college, we left a note that said, "Dishes!" on the sink.
The only thing we didn't do was make meaningful noises with our mouths to the actual people involved.
And now, in the information age, we have many more weapons in our talk-dodging arsenal. We've graduated from wide-ruled notebook paper and post-its to texts, emails, and Facebook messages. But the dilemma is the same, and so is the solution.
Look the person in the eye.
Please comment (ironically in written text form)
But there's no dilemma, unless you're planning on breaking up with me via a blog comment
Do you struggle with this communication dilemma?
Have you been hurt by a text that should have been a meeting?
Am I making all of this up?
Jon
Friends,
I'm sorry about the delay. Last week I bought a really nerdy card game, and the late night hours when I normally blog have been spent trying to acquire more victory points than my friends.
Anyway, I think most of my Tangents fit into one of three categories:
a list or analysis of things from pop culture
a philosophical idea or lesson learned from a personal story
a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe against something that annoys me
Today's Tangent is from category 3, but no worries-- I got my rabies shot (thanks, NBC, for your awesome PSAs).
The problem with pleasantries
Beside the fact that they're not pleasant enough to warrant that name
Most conversations start with Hello, Hey, or Hi. The h-word of choice is then immediately followed by a question, e.g.
How are you?
How's it going?
What's up?
What's going on?
The first two represent questions about quality of life, and the second two concern recent or interesting happenings. I will address both types, but my main issue is with the former.
Questions about how a person is doing just seem like stupid ways to start a conversation. Let's say I'm doing pretty terribly. The following will transpire:
Person: Hey man! How's it going?
Me: (It's going suckily. I've got 8 work things stressing me out, 3 relationships on the fritz, I'm having a bad hair day, new bills just arrived, I can't find my favorite t-shirt, my laptop crashed, I stepped in a puddle, and I have no plans this weekend. And diarrhea.) Good, thanks! How are you?
There's no option in most conversational settings to reveal how crappy we might be feeling. As I'm shaking hands with someone at a coffee shop, it just doesn't seem okay to reveal that I'd rather be at home on my couch and not have to move or think for the next 24 hours. And yet, I'm asked how I'm doing. "Pickle!!!"
The other type of opening questions aren't much better, mainly because no actual answer is expected. To ask someone "What's up?" is just another way of saying, "Please say 'Not much' and then begin our actual conversation." Were it an actual question, it would be difficult to address right at the outset of the conversation; I mean, a million things are going on, and filtering which ones are worth mentioning is too much mental strain for one moment. That's why we have the actual conversation, to bring up and discuss those things that are up.
A problem with no solution
To be fair, there definitely might be a solution. I just don't offer one here.
It seems to me that the only ways to break out of this pickle would be to stop asking these meaningless opening questions or to start answering them earnestly. But neither one seems feasible. They're so ingrained in me that I don't know if I could quit asking them. And I hate to say it, but on those rare occasions in which someone answers honestly about hurt and pain and discouragement, I can't help but think, "Dude, quit being such a Debbie Downer. We're in an Applebee's."
Other people try to circumvent the superficiality by asking, "How are you doing -- really?" But unless you're on the phone or alone somewhere, this just seems too emotionally invasive, especially for the very first thing said in a conversation.
Your turn
No funny small text this time.
What's up?
How's it going?
What's going on?
How are you?
But seriously, comments appreciated.
Jon
[
Part 1: At what time did people post happy birthday?]
[Part 3: What did people write on my wall for my birthday?]
This tangent, we move forward to the second installment of Facebook birthday analysis: who, exactly, posts on one's wall on shis birthday? You might be thinking, "I have my own birthday and my own facebook wall. Why would I need this study to answer that question?"
Well, let me answer your fictional thought-question with a question: Do you have the time or inclination to scour through dozens and dozens of posts and think through how many ridiculously non-friend people show up or from which eras of your life the people hail? Assuming you have a job or a life, your answer's probably "No." My answer, however, is "yes."
Enough guesswork Q&A. I give you the two questions of today's tangent, both of which look at the personnel of my online birthday:
1. How close to me were the people who wished me a happy birthday?
This is, I think, one of the most interesting and pressing questions in our whole study of Facebook b-days. There always seem to be people showing up on your wall once a year whose name is barely recognizable, or whose last real-life interaction with you was a violent blood feud.
To answer this question, I had to (somewhat morbidly) assign closeness categories to my wall posters. Everyone fell into one of the following categories:
Family: relatives through blood or marriage.
Friends: people who have a consistent, positive presence in my life and from whom a wall post on a different day of the year wouldn't seem strange.
Barely: this weird limbo exists for people who are distant acquaintances or people who were in my life years ago. A wall post from them on any other day would be odd.
None: these people have absolutely no part in my life, and their post to me, even on my birthday, is somewhat mystifying.
Well, it's a pretty even split between Friends and Family (48%) and... everyone else (52%). It really goes to show how powerful a force the Facebook Birthday is -- it can create a social interaction that would otherwise never be there.
One final interesting note on this is that one person who posted on my wall existed on shis own special level of "No relationship." This was a person (friend of a friend) with whom I have literally never had an in-person OR online interaction. How we became facebook friends in the first place is an enigma. How a birthday post came about might literally make my brain explode with mystery.
2. From which phase of my life did these well-wishers first know me?
They say high school will be the best years of your life. Then when you're going off to college, they hope you've forgotten that statement and tell you the next four years will be the best. Middle school, well, everyone pretty much concedes that's going to be a dramatic, hormonal disaster.
But when it comes time for the annual "crawl out of the woodworks" online fiesta, which era will represent? In my social network, there are three 4-year time spans that figured to make solid birthday contributions: high school, college, and "Pittsburgh" (the four years I've spent here in grad school and with my current ministry job). And here's what happened:
As you can see, the general rule was that the more recent the era, the greater its contribution. There's a logic to that, as these are people I've met, become facebook friends with, and interacted with more recently. So the relationship, as "distant" or "non-existent" as it might have been on the previous chart, is fresher.
The one meaningless but funny exception to this law of diminishing wall posts was the dreaded middle school. We must have really all tried to blot that crap out of our memories. Except for my perennial locker and homeroom neighbor Cherie. The alphabet has a funny way of affecting unimportant parts of your future.
Help build momentum for the dramatic conclusion
Next time we'll look at the most interesting topic -- what, exactly, did people post on my wall? Until then, please tangent with me:
What's been your experience with super-distant people or mortal enemies wishing you a happy birthday on facebook?
Was middle school as bad for you as it was for everybody else?
Jon
I rarely yearn to be a developmental psychologist (if that's even a real term), but now is one of those times. Because as I think back on my childhood music phases, I'm noticing that they occurred later in life than last post's TV phases or next post's movie obsessions. Truth be told, I had very few "childhood" music faves, just a bunch of obnoxious adolescent ones.
Why is that? Referring back to my opening sentence, I'm guessing it has to do with the development of our minds. Kids have ample time to watch TV and are drawn in, entranced, to moving things. But what context is there in a kid's life for music? They don't have the patience to just sit around listening to music, and so if they have favorite songs, they're probably from Barney or some wretched Mickey Mouse detective show (much to the chagrin, I'm sure, of parents and older siblings).
Well, enough pretend psychology. Here were my major musical phases growing up. Be warned: they're going to shock you.
My ridiculous list of favorite musical performers while I was growing up
Phase 1 (1993-1994): Billy Joel
My early love of Billy Joel was the result of three factors:
- I was the age when I started to like music
- My dad was a huge Billy Joel fan and would often play his records for me
- Billy Joel rules
And in case there's any doubt, I mean that third one. Yeah, he has some annoying songs ("Uptown Girl" comes to mind), but he has some awesome ones as well. One of my favorites is "The Ballad of Billy the Kid", the first line of which is
"From a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia, rode a boy with a six gun in his hand."
That line alone compels me to love Billy Joel.
- [Tangent-within-a-tangent: I have postulated a Billy Joel Hypothesis. It states that if you visit an establishment in Pittsburgh, PA that plays a loop radio of pop music, you will hear a Billy Joel song during your time there. I don't know which song, and I don't care how short your visit it. You'll hear one.]
Phase 2 (1995-1997): Boyz II Men
For those of you who know me now but didn't in 1996, which probably accounts for 99% of people reading this, this will be a huge surprise. But believe me, or at least believe my Boyz II Men cassette tapes, that I was a huge fan.
But there are consequences to every action, and being a fan of an R&B group at age 10 is no exception. There is a hilarious-- and I mean uproariously funny, embarrassing, horrifying, amazing, and profoundly disturbing-- home video of me and my cousins, circa 1995, in which my cousin Simeon and I sing "I'll Make Love to You" as the musical accompaniment for our cousins' dancing. I don't know about Simeon (who was a player from a young age), but I definitely didn't know what making love was at age 10.
I just sang about it.
Phase 3 (1998-1999): Bad Religion
I will probably devote at least one blog entry someday to the craziness of middle school. Isn't it amazing that almost everyone, especially girls, hated middle school? But I won't let myself get carried too far away on that tangent.
For me, middle school wasn't too bad. And for that, I mainly have to thank my then-best friend Brett. At a time when other middle schoolers were... well honestly I have no idea what they were doing... Brett and I would sit in his basement and ponder metaphysics, mathematics, Jesus, and women. I'm serious. That's what we did.
In addition to making my middle school years unique, nerdy, and cool, Brett introduced me to a lot of music. Foremost among this music was Bad Religion.
Ironically, the person who probably laid the most groundwork in those years for me to know God also introduced me to a band whose logo is an X-ed out cross.
Phase 4 (1999-2000): Dave Matthews Band
I won't go into much detail here. Dave Matthews Band's first three studio albums were incredible, and they were even better live. But beyond just the music, the rampant popularity of DMB eliminated all middle ground and forced all my peers and me to choose a side:
- DMB-lover: You had to go to one DMB concert every 18 months, listen to them at least once a week, and complain about how the radio was killing "Crash" by overplaying it.
- DMB-hater: Your only rule was mandatory complaining anytime a DMB song came on the radio, a DMB fan droned on about their awesomeness, or a "DMB" bumper sticker was spotted on a car.
I chose to love.
What about you?
What music did you grow up on?
Please comment. I get lonely.
Jon
