I am not making up that headline. In the same week that I began my own 140 Twitter-post journey to explain why Twitter was the next step in the de-personalization of over-noisification of the very tiny (yet very consumptive) subset of humanity that uses social media, the IDP and Ethan Nichtern joined the Twitter bandwagon and some Buddhist monk said it can help with daily happiness.
FaceBook is the world’s champion social network site, but even FaceBox only has about 2% of the world’s population as active users. However, those 2% of users also correlate to a very high percentage of the world’s most affluent people (you fall into this category if you are making more than about $20,000 a year, and have a FaceBox account). As Twitter has exploded among the technorati, celebrities, corporations, early adopters, and gotta-have-its online (myself included, in 3 of those 5 categories), it’s rocketed from having 0.008% of the world’s population signed up to a massive 0.01% (6,000,000 users as of this week).

Why does this matter? Because each new technology is invented in a vacuum. Each new way of communicating is invented by a handful of people who have great intentions but have no way of testing real-world implications without actually unleashing the technology on …the real world. And all new technology, particularly online, will by definition find its way into the hands of the people most likely to buy shit they don’t need. If you look up a picture of those 175,000,000 Facebook users in the high school yearbook, you’ll find that they were voted “Most Likely to Over-Consume”.
Is Twitter bad? No. Not if even Buddhist Monks say it can lead to happiness. But as you add more and more ways of communicating with other humans via electronically transmitted words and pictures to your life, you are absolutely sacrificing something else – time to spend hearing their voice, or seeing them in person.
Is there a correlation between our disconnect with the rhythms and resources of very real (and very tired) little planet, and the increasing amount of time spent over the last decades watching TV, going online, and communicating without actual personal interaction? Duh.
So okay, my one man Don Quixote against Twitter has crumbled in the face of compadres and Twitterites like Patrick Groneman, empathetics, EthanNichtern, and stillman_music, all of whom use Twitter in a way that makes sense – to communicate ideas or thoughts to their circle friends that don’t really make sense as a phone call or email or blog post. And my crusade really took a blow when Twitterer LamaMarut let us know yesterday that Twitter use can actually lead to happiness.
I guess I just have to be mindful that I am not using Twitter or anything else online as one more way to feed my insatiable appetite for news and information and stuff coming at my brain 24/7.
One final point that I’ve been marinating and can’t quite figure out. If you know me, you know that I am a social and outgoing guy. I have dozens of friends, hundreds of acquaintances and hundreds of “friends” on FaceBook. Of all those people (many of whom work in technology or media) I only know four people personally who regularly use Twitter. Just four. And all four of those people are not only Buddhists but are members of the Interdependence Project. Including me as a regular Twitter user, four of us are either on the board, running the IDP, or are leaders of projects at the IDP.
Why, of all my friends, is this little band of cutting-edge Buddhists the earliest adopters of this new communication technology? Why are the only people I really know who really use Twitter a bunch of folks who’ve discovered that Buddhism is not only relevant to 21st century life, but that it offers a critical set of tools for interacting and communicating in a modern world?
THAT is what, more than anything, has caused me to stop and pay attention. These are not only people I consider to be deeply creative, compassionate, and intelligent, but they are some of my favorite people in NYC. There’s something going on here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Follow Buddhists on Twitter + IDP’ers: Patrick Groneman, empathetics, Stillman_Music (great daily music posts), EthanNichtern
Follow The Interdependence Project on Twitter