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I’ve got a confession to make: I’m having an uncharacteristically productive day. I’ve dinged off everything on my to-do list before lunch, responded to all those emails with the “eventually” flag, caught up on the latest news at TechCrunch and Personal Democracy Forum, and even cleaned my keyboard. Yet despite this, I’m anxious. Because when I logged in this morning, I got a most unsettling message:

Now, to be clear, I’ve got profiles on a lot of networks. Most of them are just to test them out and do research, but Facebook is one of only a couple SocNets I actually use for social purposes. I glance through my mini-feed a few times a day to see what’s going on with my friends, compare movie preferences with co-workers, check out applications for both cool potential for clients and to see what I’d actually use.

And while I’m nowhere near as active a Facebooker as someone still in school who has hundreds of friends, I’m still feeling a sort of strange nervousness to be off the network. And that, of course, makes me a little more nervous. It’s not genuine withdrawal - just a vague feeling of anxiety that I might need to poke someone and be unable to do so (does anyone actually know a poke means?).

And I’m not even a Facebookaholic. There are times when I don’t check it all weekend or when I’m out of town. On busy days at the office I just forget to log in all day. And I won’t check it at home some nights. But to go there and see that I can’t get in - that’s causing anxiety similar to leaving my cell phone at home - I know where it is, I know that I’ll have it when I get home, and I know nothing will happen to it or me while apart, I just feel vaguely unsettled.

Is this a symptom of the new superconnectedness of the 21^st century internet? That we become psychologically connected to the hive mind and are unsettled when we can’t make that connection? And it only gets worse as you get more connected - look at Blackberry users on the Metro where they can’t get a connection - or are nearing the dreaded dead battery. Look at how quickly everyone powers up their cell phones after a long flight lands - some of them are calling friends and family to let them know they’ve arrived, but some are just powering them up to get back on the grid.

Well, time to get back to work. I think I’ll just change my Twitter to let folks know I’ve posted something new…

Uh oh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.