Can Digital Sex with Your iPad Ever Be Wrong?

Let's again talk about the miracles of digital, of the Internet and all the enabled sub-miracles like email, TM, Skype, Twitter, YouTube, Smart Phones, Facebook, etc. The list is endless and the surface of who, what, when, where, why, and how, and to reach out to someone is only barely scratched.

Cheonae, an artist friend with a perpetual, killer Sassoon cut, proclaimed last week she's getting off the grid (she meant off internet access at home). "I spend too much time on it and I can answer emails at the university. Plus, it costs me 60 bucks a month. For what, really?"

"Retreat to dial-up," I said.

"I can't. I gave up my land line last year," she replied. "I'll try doing at-home Internet cold turkey for a week before I actually commit at-home Internet suicide."Sounded like a plan. The rest unfolded like a movie:

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.

Facebook showed a 69% increase, going from 69 million to 117 million unique users, while Twitter.com posted gains of 45%, going from 13.8 million to 20.1 million.

How do we stop their metasticizing?

Should we? Should we even try?

People want to reach out and touch... somebody... anybody at times -- it depends on their needs and desperation levels and how easily they are reached. (Do you try to connect, [smoke, drink, name your poison] first thing in the morning? "Well, do ya', punk?")

The voice of Annie Lennox stylizing the lyrics to the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams thrums in my head while bastardized lyrics pop out of my mouth, into Joanne's tape recorder.

Social media: Some of them want to abuse you
some of them want to be abused.
Sweet dreams are made of this
who am I to disagree? . . .

Truth is, everyone is a potential addict waiting for their drug, , their action, to come along -- heroin, running, junk food or social media. They all can be streetcars of desire to someone, for a month, a year, or a lifetime. Others just use the action to make life easier, more fun or more productive, and move on.

Truth is, we know we are a garrulous, outreaching species. However, I don't think we fully appreciated, as a social species, just how dependent we are on peer contact and validation until technology and our digital, wireless world showed us the way to Utopian connectedness.

We thought compulsive connecting was largely a teenage affliction, something they grow out of. Clearly, it's not. It's pure human. Kids just have more time to indulge it.

It is not far from the truth to argue that our humanness is epitomized, is most manifest in our social interactions.

I seem to recall Freud commenting that a human, born into a social void, in an absence of social interaction, interconnectedness, would not be human, as we know him. The structure of id, ego, and superego would not exist because they grow out of social interaction.

Language and language based thought would not exist in the absence of social interaction and socialization into a verbal society. That's the timeless fascination of feral children stories, stories like The Wild Boy of Aveyron and of the "humanization" of blind, deaf, and mute Helen Keller, the subject of the play and movie, The Miracle Worker. Let's throw in Tarzan while we're at it.

With the advent of cheap, easy, mediated communication, the flood gates to the human sociability penchant have opened wide. The genie's out of the bottle. Technology, in the forms of a dazzling array social media platforms and wireless devices, has shown us the insatiable light of our dependence, our lust, for connectedness. We're skirting the edges of the 21st century brain. It not going away.

We are increasingly brain-wired by the media we use. A new culture is evolving about it. It's the future. Some of us will use it; some of us will be abused by it. Dreams and nightmares are made of this. Everyone's looking for something...

(And don't get me started on living in an SM-inspired, post-privacy world. I've run out of space and time.)