Quirkyalone

Twitter’s Aspiring Micro-Celebrities

Apr 13, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Pop Culture, technology

Note: This piece was also published on the Huffington Post. I find myself evolving into a technology social critic, perhaps a new evolution in career as an uncredentialed urban anthropologist. So watch for more stuff like this in this blog space, as well as more directly quirkyalone-related stuff, especially as the group blog finally launches within about a month.

On my first day at South by Southwest, an annual geek conference dedicated to celebrating the brightest minds in emerging technology, I already felt like a speck of Internet dust because I only have 157 Twitter followers.

I took drastic measures and pulled out my iPhone for an old-fashioned phone call. My confidante was my former business partner Adam. I knew he would immediately understand. In that moment, I officially hated the Internets.

Just a day before, I was giddy about attending South by Southwest (SxSW) for the first time. Billed as the center of digital creativity, and not to be confused with the film or music festival that immediately follows it, “South by” attracts entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, advertisers, and venture capitalists. By day, thousands of us roamed the Austin Convention Center to go to panels like “Mad Men on Twitter” (now even Peggy Olsen has a Twitter account), “Love in the Cloud: Online-Only Marriages,” and “What Do I Do With Myself, Now that the Economy Has Collapsed?” At night, shoulder-to-shoulder parties raged.

As much as I wanted to have the random, stimulating conversations in the hallway that everyone says defines the event, something felt very wrong. In fact, my first tweet was: “I feel contrarian urge coming on in first day of #sxsw never seen more distracted sea of people.”

SxSW felt like a flashback to high school, but all the kids are former debate and math team nerds. Summoning all their repressed teenage angst, my fellow conference participants seemed to be taking a new shot at the yearbook superlatives. I quickly realized I was living in the vortex of a geek popularity contest.

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Who’s going to SXSW?

Mar 11, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: technology

Suddenly I’m going to SXSWinteractive this weekend in Austin! I love spontaneity. I have no planned agenda and won’t be speaking on any panels, just soaking up all the creative and entrepreneurial energy. (A nice contrast to the dour headlines, I hope.) If you’re a blogger, entrepreneur, artist, or otherwise creatively inspired person who will be there and want to meet up, email me at ino @ quirkyalone.net or if you must you can send me a DM on Twitter. Ha! (See below post.)

This Is Your Brain on Twitter

Mar 10, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Pop Culture, technology

Note: This piece also appeared on the Huffington Post.

Two weeks ago, on a Friday night around midnight, I was loitering on the sidewalk outside a San Francisco bar with two friends, about to head home but not quite ready to call it a night. A guy standing nearby on the sidewalk told us that that our red, green, and blue jackets, respectively, made us look like the lightbeams that create a color spectrum on television sets and computers. It’s hard to imagine a geekier pick-up line than “You look like RGB!” But that’s what passes for flirtation in 2009 San Francisco in the (waning?) era of web 2.0. He wanted to take a picture of us and upload it to Flickr.

As a writer who also works a product manager in social media, I know the web 2.0 type.

I quickly realized that this web 2.0 boy was part of the Twitter cult, or, as they call themselves, the Twitterati.

The Twitterati are in full effect in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, and Seattle, where members live their lives as performance art. They exist, therefore they tweet.

Whenever they watch a sunset, eat something delicious, or feel disappointed by a product, they tap out a message on their phones or laptops. Some of them tweet a few times a day, some as many as ten. Or they twitpic, uploading photos. They also seem to believe Twitter is going to revolutionize our lives.

I was looking for a bit more excitement to cap off my evening, and now I had found it. My friends went home and web 2.0 and I hung out on the sidewalk for another hour. First we talked about where we live and what we do, but then, about Twitter! His unself-conscious fervor fascinated me. I played anthropologist, listening to him gush about how Twitter was ushering in a new era of connection that we so desperately needed after the Bush era of fear and division.

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Zeitgeist Alert: The End of Aloneness?

Feb 08, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Solitude, technology

Apparently I am not alone in asking if we are experiencing the end of aloneness. A few days after publishing this blog post, “Are our phones robbing us of solitude?”, I heard KQED’s Forum, our local public radio civic affairs program, take on this very question.

The guest was William Deresiewicz, an English professor who taught at Yale between 1998 and 2008 and recently published a beautiful essay called “The End of Solitude” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I can’t remember ever being so riveted by a program. I was getting ready for work, but found myself unable to leave, obsessively dialing to join the conversation.

Deresiewicz raised provocative questions: What do we lose when we deprive ourselves of solitude? What happens to college students if they never disconnect enough to sink into aloneness? Or the girl who receives 3,000 daily text messages, which means, on average, she is never alone for longer than 10 minutes? What if they have no desire for solitude at all? How is solitude related to friendship? He shared an enigmatic Emerson quotation: “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.”

Check out the radio show here. Listen for me at the end. My question: Is this an addiction to constant connectivity, and if so, what do we do to rehabilitate ourselves?

Nancy in Boston forwarded me this similarly themed piece from the Boston Globe, “The End of Alone.”

Lately I find myself taking “power solitude,” like “power naps.” I’m training for longer periods without checking emails or texts. Though I still feel addicted, I’m comforted to know that others are wondering what we are overly connected. I know I’m not alone.

Are our phones robbing us of solitude?

Jan 25, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Solitude, technology

Courtesy of Mamzel*D on Flickr, licensed through Creative Commons

Profound thought while walking across the street on a beautiful, sunny afternoon in San Francisco, checking my email on my iPhone: Are we ever really alone anymore?

Taking long walks alone is something that I cherished in my pre-cell phone days, and something I lauded in Quirkyalone as a source of creative inspiration. Long walks alone are when we allow thoughts to form, to see where thoughts lead us. Before I even uttered “quirkyalone,”  I had the image of a woman walking alone, a mix of pride, melancholy, and contentment.

Now my walks alone are punctuated by my thumb punching “check email” on my phone, when suddenly, though no one is physically present, they may as well be. Mobile technology can be so seductive and addictive, the ability to constantly check messages and feel the presence of the world swarming around us in a million little missives. But at the end of the day, we don’t feel nearly as much alone. And I think in many ways that can also harm our ability to be together.

Granted, there are, gasp, people who don’t own cell phones. But we are going mobile, where everything will be checkable. In this era of “ambient knowledge” (everything my 362 Facebook friends “know” about me that I don’t remember sharing)  and camera phones (where every moment is sharable), cutting the cord from the Internets–and being alone–takes ever more willpower.  Of course, I am the one who hits “check email” directly after a movie, when I could be luxuriating in the closing music over the credits. There’s no question that I’m addicted to the “new,” to the sense that someone cares enough to reach out and touch me, whether through email, text, voice, tagged note!

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