Il n'est pas dans mes habitudes de retranscrire intégralement un texte, toutefois cet article de Virginia Heffernan paru dans le New York Times m'a semblé pertinent :

"Let them eat tweets" par Virginia Heffernan a écrit:

Let Them Eat Tweets Twitter — the microblogging service that lets you post and read fragmentary communications at high speed — is fun, but it’s embarrassing. You subscribe to the yawps of a bunch of people; they subscribe to your yawps; and you produce and consume yawps for the rest of your days. The me-me-me clamor brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s poem about the disgrace of fame, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”: “How public — like a Frog — / To tell one’s name — the livelong June — / To an admiring Bog!” Now that I inhabit the Twitter bog, though, I don’t complain. Twitter can be entertaining, and useful — and, really, who doesn’t like the illusion, from time to time, of lots of company? I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked. In other words, I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich. Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here. These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said. In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling’s was a sadistically successful rhetorical strategy. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern gem “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard. Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home! http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/let-them-eat-tweets (version courte) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-medium-t.html (version longue)

Je partage l'opinion de Sterling. Pour avoir eu l'occasion d'observer quelque peu des réseaux comme Twitter ou même Facebook, j'ai été rapidement surpris puis effrayé par la tournure qu'ils prirent suite à leur démocratisation. Il est terrifiant de voir des individus que vous connaissez bien -je n'ai pas poussé le vice au point d'accepter des "amis" parfaitement étrangers- se livrer de la sorte et préférer cette vaine agitation virtuelle à quelques moments "aristocratiques" de solitude. Qui aurait pensé il y a quelques décennies que le luxe résiderait désormais dans le fait de ne pas être joignable à tout moment ?

et oui, la solitude n'est plus à la mode aujourd'hui. les gens semblent avoir peur de se retrouver seuls, face à eux mêmes. la société de loisir a pour conséquence de laisser de grands moments "inoccupés", et pour un certain nombre (beaucoup ?), c'est un problème. d'où cette perpétuelle agitation vide et inutile qui peut laisser perplexe.

cela me fait penser aux gens qui, lorsqu'ils parlent de culture pensent télévision, reportage, cinéma, "manifestation culturelle" et autres festivals...

tout doit être fait dans l'agitation, agitation qui évite de se poser les vraies questions, de se regader en face, et de se dire "mais au fond, qui suis je ?"