Aug 12, 2009
A Fear of Being Alone?

On a recent Saturday, I took a sunrise walk to survey my empire in the dawning light of the new day.

Looking over the garden, I saw the 100-foot row of asparagus was infested with weeds, so I took a half hour and pulled them. The ferns were six feet tall and still damp from dew, so when I headed to the house, I was ripe for a shower.

What is unusual about this experience is that I didn’t tell my friends about it on Facebook. I didn’t twitter or tweet it to anybody in 142 characters or less. I didn’t call anyone on my cell phone, or even take it with me. I sent no text messages.

I know how important it is to keep up with new technology. Imagine how different my life would have been if I hadn’t taken typing in high school. So I’m reluctant to utter words that I may be forced to eat later.

But so far, I am utterly unimpressed with social networking.

I recently took a small tour of Facebook pages that farm marketers were using as marketing tools. The comments I found there were ordinary, uninteresting, uninformative, banal and hardly worth keyboarding – and certainly a waste of time reading.

Worse still, in the process of getting onto one page I became officially declared a “friend,” which increased the site’s number of friends to 313. I thought that a bit cheeky. Apparently the standard for friendship is quite low. I just looked in the door and left without saying hi, or anything. It could have been a drive-by shooting.

The world is obviously changing and we need to keep up. And, as a democratic sort of person, I think it’s great that so many people today can express themselves so spontaneously through blogs and tweets.

But when people e-mail to say they’d like to “follow me” on Facebook or Twitter, I wonder about the quality of their lives and whether they have some huge fear of solitude. Are they stalkers? Don’t they like themselves well enough to be alone with only themselves for just a few fleeting moments? Can they go hunting or fishing without a radio, an iPod or a cell phone? Or have hunting and fishing, like bowling and tennis, been given up in favor of Wii imitations?

As I earlier said, it’s important to keep up with new technology. And one never knows what will survive into the future. Lots of people still own vinyl records and eight-track tapes with nothing to play them on – and those were once cutting-edge technologies.

In a sense, what’s happening is a lot different than what happens inside a publishing company. Writers write stuff. But editors decide what gets disseminated. Cruel as it may seem, they decide whose opinions are worth reading. The Internet has few editors except those who filter out bad words, crude comments and political incorrectness. There is no quality standard that the content must meet, for spelling, grammar or significance.

Our columnist Jerry Mills seemed to be having similar thoughts as he reflected on how tractor work and thinking go together (see page 34). While he likes his air-conditioned cab, he didn’t mention needing to stay in touch with friends or listen to his iPod. He talked about being alone and thinking. His thoughts seem to result in pretty insightful columns, well above your ordinary tweet or blog.

I’d be interested in knowing what you think about social networking. Do you do it? How does it benefit you? You can e-mail me or even scribble me a note and send it via the Postal Service. Tell me your age and whether you market wholesale or retail, as that may make a difference.




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