CUT TO:

INT. HOUSE- EVENING - A WEEK LATER

A dinner party is in progress. Cheonae is talking with embarrassed amusement to people on either side of her.

                                     CHEONAE
                                     (plaintively)
I lasted two days. That's it. The curiosity was killing me. I had to know who was emailing. Who was posting on my Facebook wall. I wanted to download a movie from Netflix. At 1 AM., because I couldn't sleep but was too tired to read. Too tired to paint. I failed. Big Time."

"Why ‘big time'?" someone asked.

                                   CHEONAE
                 (in confessional tone; plainly
                     annoyed at herself)
"Because not only did I not get off the grid, did not cancel my provider, they seduced me into committing for another year.

"How?" someone asked, chuckling.

                                    CHEONAE
By cutting the monthly charge from 60 to $29.99. They won't let me leave. I felt like Michael Corleone at the end of that piece of crap film Godfather 3. They pulled me back in.
                  (emptying her wine glass)
Damn it! I hate that I need to be so... connected!
              (putting her chin in her hand)
What the hell happened to me in the last 5 years? I used to be an independent spirit, a loner. Paint, teach, run, cook, a little love every now and then. It all worked. But now? What am I waiting for? What am I looking for? I'm constantly checking to see who's trying to contact me. 
                             (she rolls her eyes)
I don't even like half the people who do. And I barely know the other half! How's that for dumb!"

Everyone within earshot turned at her, oozing perplexed sympathy.
Cheonae looked around, saw the crowd of eyes and started to LAUGH uproariously at her own performance.

                                   CHEONAE
"Hey, it was just a stumble in the night. No biggie. I baked some brownies and fell asleep watching "Bonnie and Clyde" for the 5th time... Maybe I'll just commit Facebook suicide instead."

The day before Cheonae's dinner table wail from the heart, I had caught a South Park episode that sharply satirized social networking, and Facebook in particular. During the episode, entitled "You Have 0 Friends," Cartman and friends become engrossed in interacting on Facebook -- adding as many friends as they can because the numbers of Facebook friends and their social value have become status meters, like whose tweets you are tracking.

You all know what I'm talking about because you all get petitioned, daily, to become someone's friend, someone you may barely know, if at all, someone from two degrees of separation, whose request comes to you automatically, mindlessly, via the Facebook auto robot Contacts access routine (and you thought they really were interested in your friendship).

The South Park episode also took note of the rise of Facebook's popularity among older users of the Web site, such as parents and grandparents. It also, parodied the overall obsession with social media such as identity-experimenting games, status updates and constantly sharing totally inane, mundane information -- "Hi, it's me, I'm getting in line at the checkout counter with my organic broccoli" -- just as a way to stay in contact... with someone.

Keeping the media-covering-media zeitgeist riff going a little longer, in Sunday's NYT Style section, there was a mildly alarmist article. It concerned how spending so much time communicating via social media may seriously impair the cybernaut generation's ability to cultivate vital skills of social perception and social exchange. In other words, too much TM and Twittering can make one interpersonally tone deaf and blind, or at least vision-impaired.

This would be most obvious in interpreting non-verbal or paralinguistic cues, skills that can only come from written, telephonic or, better yet, FTF communications.

It would also show up in impaired ability to construct complex sentences and paragraphs or develop mature speaking and reading and writing vocabularies.

In other words, as Professor Harold Hill warned the wide-eyed innocents of Iowa's River City in the Broadway musical, The Music Man, "My friends, we got trouble. We're in terrible, terrible trouble."

Maybe. But show me the money. As yet, it such trouble hasn't really been demonstrated long term or beyond the anecdotal level. Even then, it often seems a matter of taste rather than of pervasive facts of population dysfunction, e.g., "why aren't they outside playing games instead of playing computer games indoors?" Or, is texting really worse than teenage "telephonitis" of yesteryear?

A few days later, I received a cheery phone call from Joanne, a journalist in Canada. She touches base periodically when she's writing about media.

"What are your thoughts on SM addiction -- My immediate SM association was "Sadomasochism."

She continued, finishing her thought, "... on not being able to live without social media?" What does the future hold when it comes to technological connectedness?" (Where had I heard that word before?)

Oh,  got it.  SM as in social media"; or as in social media addiction, not SM as in rough iPad sex in the digital age.

"Any ideas? Good quotes," she asked, playfully, and then waited for me to jump in.

Actually I had some comments on the tip of my tongue. I was primed by the events of the past few days, but I never know quite what I‘m going to say until the words start coming out of my mouth. My shadow government never sleeps. It's always putting input together to make sense of things, ready to offer it up if the occasion arises.

I threw out a bunch of stuff.

Ballistic growth of SM. According to a Nielsen Co. survey, Facebook and Twitter.com have posted big year-to-year U.S. traffic gains.