At some point in my day I often find myself talking with friends and coworkers about what's going on in our lives. The topics covered are generally the mundane details of family, work and hobbies. I feel fortunate to have a number of very clever people in my life so these otherwise forgettable conversations are often entertainingly peppered with fun twists of language.
This is "meat-space" conversation is almost always enjoyable, but more and more this type of thing seems to be taking place online. Facebook, twitter, blogs and instant messaging have taken the retelling of our lives to a new level. Certainly the telling and following can be a distraction from the events actually going on around a person. This has led to a backlash against these technologies as being addictive or non-productive.
This perspective ultimately missed the point.
All of these social networks are an extension of a fundamentally human characteristic, namely the telling of ourselves. Why do we recount tales of raking leaves and cute stories about our kids? Why do we discuss books and movies? Why do we talk about the majority of what we talk about? On some level, I believe we do this to reaffirm the reality of our own existence. The telling of ourselves externalizes our feelings, our motivations and struggles. It projects our interests and provides a channel to connect with similar aspects in other people. Ultimately, there is a strong evolutionary advantage to all this chatter in that it allows information to flow in a very efficient manner.
Rather than being a distraction from the productive aspects of real life, these conversations can in fact form the basis for enhancing not only our own knowledge, but forming the bonds to solve new problems, if only from peering into the lives of others as they solve problems in their own lives.
The people that decry this chatter miss the point that life is not linear. There's rarely a logical, well laid out path from start to completion for most of what goes on in our lives. Life is messy, and the most nonproductive, day dreamy silly parts of it are often the most valuable, both to us individually and as a society at large. We understand ourselves better though this externalization, and find gems of understanding and inspiration in the stories of those around us.
