Soapboxes aren’t for everybody

I realized something just now. No matter how many Twitters and Facebooks and Buzzes there are out there to help us communicate to everybody with whom we have kept mostly friendly relations, I don’t think the loudspeaker feel of social networking will ever impact the way I communicate with friends online like instant messaging and chatting have. Really! I realized that with Google Buzz now all of a sudden all my friends who I never see on Facebook or Twitter have been shackled and thrown into the a prison cell of social media slavery. A few examples (and for the protection of my friends and this social study, I have cloaked the participants’ names with conspicuous photoshop spraypaint).

Exhibit A:

Yes I realize my friends are especially resistant to the practice of thought broadcasting. But you know what’s fascinating? That girl who was forced into social networking by Google used to stay up late nights chatting with me on AIM. We all stayed up all night talking to each other, entering random chatrooms together and creating our own private chats where we all planned gatherings, admitted deep, dark secrets and gave each other updates on our current crushes, with whom we were most likely also chatting.

In middle school, AIM was pretty much the afternoon hangout. We could pretend we were doing homework on the computer, we could talk to all our friends at once in privacy (this was a time before cell phones — you had to use the home line) and we LOVED it.

So what is it about neo social networking that is so repulsive to those same individuals that loved chatting online? Is it the vast openness of them? The fact that it’s all public?

Ashton Kutcher claims that his own HUGELY public twitter page, @aplusk, is keeping his life calm, the tabloids Ashton-free and the paparazzi off his back. But honestly, just face it, Ashton, you used to be a hottie, and now you’re a nottie. SIMPLE AS THAT.

Plus we know this wasn’t the case for all celebrities. Take Miley Cyrus, for example, the pressure she faced while on Twitter was so intense that not only did she quit the network, she also released this deliciously wrong YouTube video. Please excuse the unfortunate girl who typed the subtitles to the following video. In fact, you can just pre-hate me for this:

I just had to use it because it works so well. And now it’s so clear: my non-networking friends are just being Miley.