Reflecting on 2008 (and 2007), I've got this to say: Web 2.0, with all its trappings of ligatures and the ability to commodiously conflate one's interaction (online, that is) with others seemed to have conceivably broken the way I communicate with people in real life; either that, or the fact that I’ve hitherto really never been much of a talker primarily. This became pronounced when I was forced, for the better part of a few hours last evening, to interact over dinner with people whom, for the most part, I barely knew–I mean, what’s a social misfit like me to do?
Make small talk, my mom frowned. It would’ve been perfectly reasonable had I not been antipathetic to the very nature of it, and it was only much later, after a dinner par highbrow discussions on academia and reluctant social intercourse did I realize how far I’d fallen. There were cousins, many of which I knew to the degree of casual familiarity, yet I felt like talking to none of them. Maybe it’s a side-effect of constantly being in contact with what is essentially nothing more than a bunch of nicknames I see everyday on MSN that, with the right strings of text as prompts, reply in kind fashion.
I can't say I’m proud of this. The problem with this is that it dehumanizes communication to an facile vector where someone exists in the context not so much because you care about him but because we share something in common. It is people who share something in common with us that we care about them beyond what they can offer to us, but is that really all there is to this Möbius loop? To be honest, I’m disgusted with myself. I used to not have this problem at all when I was young–in fact, one side-effect of having to go cold turkey from the internet in 4sir was increased social interaction with my camp mates, other camp mates, and anyone who was at hand: Making friends, in other words.
The problem with viewing people in real life through the lens of the Internet (MSN in particular) is that you tend to take him as a given right more than a bonus; “We have something in common, therefore we can talk” as opposed to “We talk, therefore we have something in common.” Maybe it’s an abrupt shift between paradigms that causes this; in the blink of an eye you go from talking to people who know almost everything about what you’re talking about to talking to people who are absolutely clueless about what you’re talking about, some of which whom could care less. The conversation then either turns into a hard sell where you attempt to explain your pertinacity, or a witch hunt trying to nail details onto fact sheets.
I’m not fatalistic. Granted, while there are effusive, genuine people in this world who makes conversing a lot easier through their innate sincerity and general glow, it’s hard for the most part to get people to talk about things if they’re not interested in it. Inasmuch as I’d like to say that odor testers (don't we shrivel our noses at Jianyun's cupboard?) are pretty common out there, they aren’t. So why talk about how filthy and putrid that coarse-up orange or how mediocre dinner was if you can get someone to talk about an interesting phenomenon, the latest in politics, or something epic they’ve done?
It's hard. The taxonomic internet classifies us according to what we like, but the same isn’t true of real life, and what’s worse is that people don’t even try. They would rather be conversing about the dullest things possible for the sake of pleasantries, or they might even do so ironically, having resigned themselves to the fact that no one would find what they think interesting interesting. It could also be a simple matter of prioritizing one existence over the other: hikkikomori sociopaths who vegetate persistently in front of their screens, web-illiterates who can't find a simple MLE1101 solutions' manual to resort to swiping my laptop, but what about the rest of us, the normal ones?
Perhaps it’s for the better that I don’t wish for an answer, for if I had the means I’d take my time to circumnavigate around to answering it. Or maybe it’s good that I do, since I might just be able to herald the New Year by not habitually logging into MSN and checking my emails thrice a day, or mastering the art of small talk when it counts. So much for Christmas tidings. What a year.