Beyond the Social

One of my friends wrote at Twitter that, when it comes to social networks, there is a big difference between having something to say and having to say something.

This may seem obvious at first, but for a lot of people I know – myself included – it really doesn’t make a difference. And it shouldn’t.
Sure it is nice to have something relevant to post. It makes us proud of the contribution. And, paraphrasing Paulo Coelho (Yes, I know. My old friends would say I don’t exactly appreciate him from a literary quality point of view. But he is a nice dude.), we can use Twitter to spread Good.

However, when we post day-to-day silly stuff, we are not necessarily being needy, or egocentric. We just want the people we care about, and that may be hundreds or thousands of miles away from us, to have an idea of what we’ve been up to. It is far from ideal and only a resemblance of a relationship, but it is so much more than nothing.

If posting that I’ve been sick in bed will get my busy brother out of his impossible routine to stop and chat for a while, who cares this is irrelevant for more than 99.99% of mankind?
If writing that I will be in San Francisco 10 days from now will give my team the feeling we are always in touch, despite being scattered across two continents, so be it! It does not matter that it wasn’t meaningful or witty.
If looking at sporadic pictures is what it takes to see my nephews, nieces and the children of my dearly missed friends grow up, I will embrace it gratefully and gracefully.

So, we write to share. We write to cherish the ones we love.
We write to amuse, to woo, to impress, to shock, to warn, to wonder.
We write not only because we want our existences to mean something and leave figments of our hopeful and dreamy minds recorded, even if for brief posterity. We write because we want the people we know to keep knowing us while we change these daily little bits; as we learn from new experiences they cannot witness; as we have no choice but to hold and touch only their smiling frozen images with our souls.