Clunky Flow

Somethings in life just have to be experienced to be appreciated.  You have to let them flow over you and stop for a minute always asking “What’s the point of this?”.  Think of sunsets.  Think of birdsong.  Think of ping-pong. Oftentimes to answer that question is to analyse the experience. And sometimes thats not such a good thing to do.  It spoils the moment and the act of appreciation. Mark Twain once said “Analysing humor is like dissecting a frog. After your finished - its dead”.  Twain had a knack for taking an idea that was so unutterably obvious to one half of the population and presenting it afresh to the other half.  And in doing so he could them immediatley make them see that they had been stuck on seeking an answer to what was kinda the wrong questions in the first place.  He’d have had great fun explaining Twitter. But, of course, Twain is incommunicado. If your still looking for that Aha! moment on Twitter, then you could do worse in the meantime than visiting the post below: 

Excerpted from a this post by Leisa Reichelt

I find myself talking about Twitter quite a lot. I’m not the only one. The behaviours that Twitter has made more visible are tremendously interesting.

I’ve been using a term to describe my experience of Twitter[...]I call it Ambient Intimacy.

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this, but they tend to be not so noisy themselves. It seems to me that there are lots of people for who being social is very much a ‘real life’ activity and technology is about getting stuff done.

There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch. 

Read on

The fact is, like it or not, its our genetic legacy to be hard-wired to hunger for ambient intimacy.  From an evolutionary perspective, those who weren’t inclined to be in the thick of all that background noise and meaningless information were in serious trouble.   That is why people are almost always drawn back time and again to where the action is at.  It soothes that need at the deepest level.  It may not be of any apparent practical use. But. Nevertheless. We need it. We hunger for it. And we will pay others who make us feel closer to it. Witness the hunger for celebrity gossip and the magazine industry that thrives on generating meaningless chatter about people whose lives will never impact on ours in any meaningful way and look at how people lap it up and give personal meaning to it.  And observe how they then go on to build and create new and truly meaningful social bonds through sharing this meaningless chatter amongst their friends and acquaintances.  The magical and often overlooked thing is that the sharing of meaningless dross is the raw material or key ingredient of the glue that we use to form and maintain our the social bonds that become our most meaninglful relationships.  If celeb goss doesn’t do it for you, consider the contagious passionate devotion many people have to watching and talking about sports.  If there was one man who measured up to Mark Twain in his ability to get to the heart of the matter and illuminate it from within it was Bill Shankly when he said ”Look, at the end of the day, football is not a matter of life or death. It’s much more important than that.”   

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