Bruce Sterling during a talk at SXSW made a comment that poor people love their cellphones. The inference was that privacy costs money and 'connectivity is poverty'. Nick Carr writes in a similar vein:

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together.

Tough comments for me to swallow since I have been an avid internet user since the early 1990s and was sufficiently immersed in the internet to remember the hassles and tribulations of IRC before the http protocal dominated social interaction through the internet.

I am winding back on the social networks, I am unsure if it is because I have seen these things before and am less faddish these days. The cool kids move on to the next one anyway after a time.

I have trekked through the internet from different protocols and websites so it isn't like this is all new to me. I also think there is a downside to the third order nature of facebook and how it invades privacy; and as a consequence I deleted my facebook profile.

However, I am not interested enough in twitter to tweet which I suspect is an element of cynicism that is creeping in with experience and age. Maybe, as Sterling and Carr suggest, it is because of the increasing wealth that comes with age; a young twenty two year old is desperate for social interaction and will take it whereever he can get it, a thirty eight year old is more at ease with the relationships in his life such as marriage, family and friends. The world of the almost forty is more stable and certain than he just twenty.

Or maybe I am just too old. I am comfortable with that. I never was good at programming VCRs anyway.

More Reading on Bruce sterling

• Bruce Sterling
• Social Networks
• Social Networking
• Social Networks as a Sign of Loneliness