That was especially true when I knew the people involved.
While being made privy to the rumors, I also suspected the conversations should have taken place in a privy, one like the two-hole outhouse my grandparents had on their farm. The whole thing had a disagreeable smell.
I’ve since come to see that rumors have one major advantage: They give us a heads-up that something might be in the air, making it possible to adjust before the truth smacks us in the face.
Things are different in world of In-Your-Facebook.
One day, two people are in a relationship, might even be married, and their faces are smiling out from a page. The next day, one is in a relationship with another person and has unfriended the previous one, although, in this circumstance, unfriending seems far too mild a term.
It’s probably no different, in the end, from what happened 40 years ago when Jim Croce sang that his former girlfriend was “livin’ in L.A. with my best old ex-friend Ray.” But I can’t seem to catch up to a world in which personal lives, too, are on a 24-hour news cycle.
There’s also something about the detail with which we publicly vent after breakups — or in the midst of online political disagreements — that has made the traditional term “airing dirty laundry” obsolete.
As OMG as some of the online details are, I think the only think that’s kept Tide, Cheer and All from posting ads nearby is that no one yet has figured out how to remove those kinds of stains.
Like our online political rants at one another, they leave a mark.
All this detailed venting of private things disturbs me almost as much as the thought that Anthony Weiner actually talked through the phones whose camera functions he took full advantage of.
I figured out what I think might be the issue with Antisocial Media, an observation which will surprise no one.
It’s illustrated by two stories.
The first comes midway into a band practice, when it’s time to move to a different song. When the new song is mentioned, someone asks, innocently enough, if Fluff, our lead singer, plays guitar on this one.
Fred, deadpan, says, “I thought this song had more than three chords.”
Then, before the laughing dies down, Fluff fires up his pouting, hurt voice and whines, “Hey, I’m standing right here!”
It’s taken as razzing just because we’re all in the same room.
On Antisocial Media, we are not.
The second story has to do with bicycling.
Our trio of ragtag bikers often takes to country roads and often passes houses out in the country whose properties are patrolled by dogs. Many of those dogs would get much nearer to us and some of them nip at our heels, if it weren’t for invisible fences, which keep them from going too far.
Most of us have our own built-in invisible fences that keep us from behaving badly toward one another, from talking about things we know are going to rile one another up, and from fracturing friendships we’d rather keep.
Those fences are activated when we’re in the same room with one another, sitting at the same table, or shooting the breeze in lawn chairs out back of a garage. That, it turns out, is our most social medium.
Because, hey I’m standing right here.
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