A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Virginia Heffernan entitled “Let Them Eat Tweets: Why Twitter is a Trap“.  This article was, in turn, a response to a presentation by author and idea man extraordinaire Bruce Sterling at the South by Southwest conference.  In his talk he held forth (some would say “ranted”) on the place of Twitter in our Brave New Internet-saturated World.  Here a quote from Herffernan’s article:

These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said.In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling’s was a sadistically successful rhetorical strategy. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern gem “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I hold Sterling in a certain degree of awe.  He is one of those rare people whose fiction and prose both have more thought-provoking ideas per paragraph than should be allowable by law.  Heffernan cites the summary of Sterling’s remarks made by a friend of hers, namely that “connectivity is poverty.”  To be fair to Sterling, there are other accounts of the talk (the text and/or video does not appear to be available on the web at the moment) that say his point was that connectivity would be an indication of poverty rather than wealth.

Given the direction of the debate over the “digital divide”, i.e., that the rich would have access to this new world of limitless information and connectivity and the poor would not, Sterling makes a good point inasmuch as cheap electronics allow many people from the lower reaches of the food chain to own a cell phone or even a nominal computer.  In fact, this has been the pattern of new technology throughout history; the poor acquire what was normally reserved for the rich.  Music and theater on demand, higher more abundant food, personal transportation, etc.

Another quote from Heffernan’s article touches on this and expands further:

Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

But at this point I beg to differ both with Sterling just a bit.
The poor do indeed obsess over the quantity of their connections, but the rich go for quality.  It’s as old as the Old Boys’ Network.  The banal Tweets that capture the mundane activities of all your associates who are going nowhere in life give one a sense of community, but little else.  Follow someone with something to say, on the other hand, and Twitter becomes a stream of interesting and provocative ideas.

But by the same token, let us not neglect those idle men of leisure who sever their ties with the mundane, and keep themselves aloof from the web at the cost of living inside a bubble of unreality.  Recall our erstwhile president and many others of his class, rightly ridiculed for living in a fake reality as contemptible as that of any trailer-trash soap opera addict. But at the same time, consider what one could do if one were properly connected with just ten of the more notable persons in their rolodexes.

In my opinion, the “connectivity indicates poverty” dictum applies most in the area of advertising.   Think about it.  The junk mail, spam, broadcast commercials you are bombarded with every day is staggering.  I rather doubt that the truly wealthy are subjected to such messages whose sole purpose is to make you sufficiently discontented with your life that you are compelled to spend money to “fix” it.   They have people to cull their mail, take their calls, and basically screen them from the ravages of Madison Avenue. Case in point: a nearby low-budget restaurant that is part of a national chain just installed large-screen televisions in the dining area.  These TVs spew a constant sludge of programming made especially for this chain.  In other words, some marketing genius decided that one’s dining experience eating cheap food would somehow be enhanced by adding a steady stream of commercials to the ambiance.  That is connectedness I can live without.  Once I find a job, I swear I’m going to invest in a TV-Be-Gone before going back.

Speaking of which, the job hunt also exemplifies the connectivity/poverty paradigm.  The usual strategy is to cultivate as many connections as you can in order to find the one that can get you re-employed, stopping the slide from poverty to destitution. I never make more contacts than when I am job-hunting, and most of them aren’t worth a damn.  In practice, most of my job hunts have ended successfully because of a personal contact, not because someone saw my resume on a generic job site.  The shotgun approach is still very popular among the many who seek jobs; it feeds the illusion that you are doing something useful.  However, among the well-off a few quality connections are all that is required–assuming a job is even necessary in the first place.   When you reach a certain level of wealth a job is either a paid hobby or a live-in fashion accessory.

The new connectivity–Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all the rest–and the mess that flows from it is yet another example of how a new technology initially reduces the quality of something it is applied to.  Only later when the technology has matured and the understanding of it becomes common knowledge does it really become useful.  Anyone who was around when desktop publishing was a fresh buzzword will know whereof I speak.

It is with just a little irony that I write this maybe a week after making my first contact as a licensed ham radio operator (KI6YPF).  I do not own a radio, but using a borrowed rig I made contact with “Steve” (KC0ZTC) in Kansas City, KS using a few hundred dollars of gear running off of a couple of car batteries through a portable antenna set up in a nearby park.  No satellites, no cables, and yet with only the wattage of a strong light bulb I could talk to someone across half a continent.  It was a fleeting connection that had the quality and excitement of new enlightenment in spite of its randomness.