The Anti-Social Network

A dear friend of mine, upon observing my inactivity on facebook, sent me a concerned text. It was on Christmas and while simultaneously wishing me a merry one, she made sure to see I was "okay". I was, and so I put her concerns to rest. We continued on about projects we were involved in. My friend is a poet and a photographer. She's trying to put together a gallery to exhibit her work in The Bronx. I told her, as I've told many others when they ask such things, that I have been working on noise music and writing short stories. I feel this to be an overstatement but nevertheless it is what buys up my time, on the few sparse occasions when my time is for sale.

Her concern made me realize that deactivating my facebook page--the action of doing such a thing--is possibly being understood as, a crisis or overwhelming problem to which the attention necessary to face it has left no room for facebook participation.

I recently met up with some friends I haven't seen in a while--I wonder now, how surprised they were to find me full of spirit and emptied of any dejection impressed by my socially networked silence. Fact of the matter, when I think about it at all, I'm very well in mind to say I've never felt as much myself as I have this late Fall and early Winter. Is it only a coincidence that I've been off facebook for almost just as long? And while it is definitely true that I have narrowed down my immediate friends to one or two, I'd not deny friendship to any of the friends on that profile friend list. But because facebook has become the most standard way of social communication exchange, I am taking pure advantage in remaining mute, as that is the surest way to have silence for yourself. And I need that silence, very much now. I need all the negative space onto which to place one subject, watching the contrast and how it communicates. I feel as I've placed myself under self-examination--preserving that which makes me who I am, and carefully taking full notice of the elements that threaten the homeostasis of that identity. Or maybe its not that at all, perhaps I just want to be alone and share myself with only someone as fucked up as I am. If the latter is in fact true, then my silence is only one exercised by distraction--as I'm too busy stripping off my layers to notice I'm removing certain ties that are bound to those tossed factions.