Colin Marshall

The Plight of the Social Maladroit: coda

I've been interested by what feedback this series has brought in so far. Most of it comes from those who see their reflection in my descriptions of social maladroit-hood. ziqi writes:

I too, grew up as an only child, born in 1985. I was surrounded by video games, DOS games, tv, but didn't really notice my own lack of, I think for those learning tango, they call it "unconscious incompetence". I only started noticing it as I turned 15-16, I had difficulty getting along with others (especially girls). Only when I reached "conscious incompetence" did I realize how socially maladjusted I was.

His highlighting of unconscious incompetence prompted me to posit my own version of the Dunning-Kruger effect: is a true social maladroit so socially inept that they're unable, because they can't receive the relevant human signals, to grasp just how socially inept they really are? This at least gives me pause whenever I think about some disastrous, isolating behavior and mutter, with relief, "At least I'm not like that." How can I be so sure?

Jonathan M. writes:

B.S. Johnson? That's pretty much me. Rubbish at building bridges and pathologically averse to self-promotion of any kind.

Although B.S. Johnson seems to have burned bridges actively and self promoted aggressively but in the worst possible way. Therefore, if you're just not good at those things, you're still a step ahead of one of Britain's greatest avant-garde novelists of the 20th century. Not so bad!

FrF writes:

Poor old me could be an ideal case study for the correctness of your thesis in this installment's last sentence! [i.e., "If there's one thing I've realized for sure about the lack of interest in developing social adeptness and an inclination for broad engagement with the outside world, it's that, to the extent that someone doesn't straighten it out, they are so fucked.]

ed_rex brings Steven Pinker to the table at the conclusion:

Having concluded that (non-abusive) parents have little to no affect upon how their children ultimately turn out — he makes the case that happiness, success, beliefs &cetera are determined roughly half by genetics and half by one's peer-group(s) — he rhetorically wonders why a parent need bother treating his or her child well, why invest in the music lessons or sports equipment, or whatever it might be the child is interested in?

Simply put, Pinker's answer is Because they will have a happier childhood, that's why!

On her own blog, Janet Berkman synopsizes the series thusly:

Marshall discusses how communication today, particulary via the internet, including so-called social networking sites, has become "autistic", or non-collaborative. Tweeting, Facebook, blogging, he argues, are intrinsically one-way forms of communication and as such, we may be losing the ability to interact socially in a give-and-take manner, whether face-to-face or online.

That's pretty good, though I should clarify something about which I was a little muddled in the original. I doubt that social networking and such causes isolation and the loss of social and/or communicative abilities. I do think that the way people use social networking is an indicator of how bad we've gotten about all this, though, whatever the cause may be. I just don't want to come off like a jerky-kneed, tech-fearing trend-piecer.

* * *
Since completing The Plight of the Social Maladroit, I've been thinking about it alongside the lessons I've learned from interviewing. (That post gained a much wider readership, which I can only assume owes to my having written it close to the noble form of the list of n things.) If you want to get less social-maladroit-y in general, I can recommend spending years hosting and producing your own interview show. Then just apply everything you trial-and-error yourself into learning — stay curious, follow your guest, ask what you actually want the answer to, and for the love of YHWH don't bring a question sheet — back to "real life" interactions.

But I think the point most relevant to the social maladroit is "Reveal your ignorance":

Hey, it beats the alternative. There's no shame in not knowing what your guest is talking about; if you don't, chances are a lot of your audience doesn't either. I rarely cringe so sourly as when I'm listening to an interview and it becomes obvious that the host is bluffing his was through something for which he neglected to prepare. I'm not about non-preparation; by all means, prepare as much as possible. But you can't know about everything in heaven and Earth.

Besides, you're in this game to develop, aren't you? Nothing impedes learning, improvement and evolution as much as pretending you already know, have fully improved and are perfectly evolved. Let's not even get into the embarrassment of realizing that you're a thousand steps up your wobbly Jenga tower of half-truths, guesses and elisions with no safe way down in sight.

Describing the condition of "smart"-labeled children, I probably should have just copy-pasted the line about "pretending you already know, have fully improved and are perfectly evolved." Even outside the realm of the whiz kid, the harder I try to observe social ineptitude, the more of it seems explainable as protection. It's all starting to look like arms clumsily huddled around the Jenga tower. If you remain in isolation, after all, nobody else can knock it down.

When someone refuses to engage with people around them because they "don't have anything to say," that's probably a lie. At least I know I'm lying to myself when I make that excuse. Of course I have things to say; I can ask questions. What if "I don't have anything to say" means "I don't have anything to say that won't reveal what I fear is my ignorance"? Or "I don't have anything to say that won't shatter my carefully constructed illusions about already having determined what I like, what I dislike, where I belong and What Really Matters?"

Shed those illusions and it suddenly becomes a lot easier to communicate. Easier said than done, I realize, but if you no longer fear being effectively "called out," you're free to act in a way you formerly would've thought out of character; free to associate with people, places, and things that would've previously conflicted with your self-mythology; free to ask about things you formerly thought you should've already known. In the intensive Metafilter-combing that led to this series, I ran across a hell of a lot of users commenting that one the most charming, disarming, likable, interesting, etc. quality was being "comfortable in your own skin." I suspect a lot of that comes down to being comfortable with what you don't know.

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part V: Everything is a Collaboration

This is the fifth in a five-part series. The fourth is here.

"Writers who are charming in person and happy to promote themselves and interact with fans will prosper," Laura Miller predicts of the brave new publishing landscape, "while antisocial geniuses may fail." While the antisocial geniuses may find it harder than ever to succeed in our socially mediafied era — and I don't want to come off as anything more than cautiously quasi-optimistic about the stuff myself — I suspect their success rate was already trivial. As examples of the unsociable novelists the likes of which we stand to lose, Miller cites David Foster Wallace, J.D. Salinger, V.S. Naipaul and Thomas Pynchon. Fair enough. But could any set of names scream "outlier" louder?

And even they, in presumably that least collaborative of all art forms, collaborated. They collaborated with their publishers, their editors, their research sources, their friends and associates who read drafts. Most importantly, they collaborated with their audiences. That sounds like nonsense, and maybe it is, but if it's not nonsense, I'll bet it's beyond relevant. What's a work, after all, without an audience? I hate to go all zen on you again, but if an audience isn't an important partner in a work, how different is that work from one hand clapping, a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it, etc.?

"I never had the ‘will I get published’ stigma. There are a lot of echoes and baggage I just don’t have," said Douglas Coupland in that same Robert Birnbaum interview from Part II. "I came through magazines originally, very briefly, just enough to make me really entirely comfortable with you are not just doing this to jack off, you are doing this to connect with other human beings and they are in on it too. This is a two-way experience. Otherwise it’s just boring." If you're making something — anything — sure, you might be making it for your own use. You might be whittling a spoon to stir your chili and yours alone. But you're probably not. You're almost certainly making something for other people, and that's easy to forget.

This isn't obvious when, say, plumbing your deepest psychological depths for some sort of confessional novel. But it even goes unacknowledged in forms where your audience-collaborators look you in the eye. Take conversation: it's excruciatingly obvious when you're with someone who doesn't treat conversation as a collaboration, isn't it? They're the ones who ceaselessly trot out the same patchy, increasingly arthritic mules from their stable of anecdotes. They don't even resemble conversationalists; they're anecdote launchers. I see equivalents in other areas all the time, people who lean hard on a set of techniques which no longer engage humanity outside themselves but which (may) briefly placate whatever human happens to be right there, right then. Think of the visual artist or the talk show host who keeps reaching into the same old bag of tricks that sort of worked for him twenty years ago.

The reason this doesn't look like success, I think, is that success involves modifications of your relationships to other people, not just setting off blips of amusement across them. Is success anything but changing your connection to others, and others' connection to you? Even the most lazy, cynical definitions of success involve it: "I want people to see my name on a marquee." "I want people to read my books and experience the story I've created." "I want more people to hear and love my music." "I want everyone to see me on TV and like me before they even meet me." Isn't this what fame is about, getting a +1 by your name in as many other brains as possible? Even -∞ is good; at least it's not a zero!

The deep trouble begins when you start seeing your potential audience, collaborators or audience-collaborators as the Other. This is the mindset of so many hapless teenage dudes on the hunt for a girlfriend: they forget that they're making a connection and not, say, playing solitaire. Adam Cadre made an astute point about this in regard to the generation of guys raised on computer games: "Want the treasure behind the door? Find the key. Want to get past the troll? Give him the fish. Want the monkey to follow you around? Give him some bananas. Want the girl to love you? Give her the right object, and just like the door, surely she will open up and yield her treasure." (Further reading: he's paraphrasing this GameSetWatch article.)

It's the same with those who would see the rest of humanity as nothing more than potential Twitter followers, votes come election day, reflectors of their own impressiveness, punching bags for their awesome ideological arguments, friends literally to be "won," people literally to be "influenced." All of us have stumbled into this hole at one time or another; some of us have been in the hole so long that we've forgotten there is a hole. Getting over it necessitates getting over ourselves, in a sense, viciously beating back our instinctive "I couldn't possibly have anything to learn from/gain from/enjoy about this person" reaction. This would be a hell of a lot easier if you just jettisoned your critical faculties and just went misty-eyed at your own seam-bursting love for the glitteringly unique snowflakes that surround you. But don't jettison those; you need 'em to even think of doing interesting things in the first place.

As it is, avoiding the doomed condition of the social maladroit seems to require a massive retooling of your assumptions about how the world works and, more dearly, your own identity. I don't know how possible it is. Maybe it's totally doable; maybe it's not doable at all. All I can clearly see is that, as it turns out, no (or few) reasonably successful men (or women) are islands: by definition, nothing (or vanishingly little) successful happens in a vacuum that contains only the person doing it. I don't mean this in the supercilious, "it takes a village" kind of bow-before-your-own-dependency-to-the-group sense. I just mean it as a reminder of something I (and perhaps you) too often neglect: no matter what it is, it's ultimately about interaction.

The principle that "you are what you do" has served me reasonably well, but that's not the only way to think about it. If what you do is a result of what you decide, I might just as well say that you are what you decide. To call back to my Merlin Mann interview quoted in Part I, he said that "you have a happy life based on good decisions and good relationships." Put differently, it appears to be not just about what you decide but equally — and maybe, I'm now ready to believe, more importantly — also how you connect. Deep down, I think we all know this. It's just that, surrounded by the last 600 years' isolation-enabling (and thus ego-protecting) technologies, the craftier among us can now eek by, pretending it isn't true, blanketing the world in the static of our autistic pronouncements. But is that life?

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part IV: The Secret Ingredients of Failsauce

This is the fourth in a five-part series. The third is here.

Like anyone desperate to make something of themselves, I think often and hard about the people I admire. Exactly what, I wonder, took them from zero to admired-by-Colin? At its worst, this thinking leads to a (potentially lifelong) snipe hunt for some illusory x factor. I find that, if you keep it higher-order, you can actually learn some useful lessons: imitate how your icons did, I've written less succinctly here before, not what they did. But it's not as if I dream of climbing up on a gilded pedestal; I only want to avoid sinking — as appears to be the natural human tendency — into the condition of the cog.

It's hardly surprising that so many of my favorite quotations have to do with just that. "People have vast potential," Philip Adams said. "Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever." Joel Hildebrand thought that "very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five," the reason being that "very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five." George Orwell observed that "the great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery." H.L. Mencken called one of the capital tragedies of youth "that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect," that a young boy's grown companions, "forced upon him by the inexorable decrees of a soulless and irrational state, are schoolma'ams, male and female, which is to say, persons of trivial and unromantic achievement, and no more capable of inspiring emulation in a healthy boy than so many midwives or dog-catchers."

Is it more important to know what drove someone to avoid coghood, or to know what drove someone else into coghood? I'm actually slightly more fascinated by the latter. The only reason I spend more time on the former is because it's easier to ask a person what went right in their life than what went wrong. This, of course, simply sweeps aside the thorny issue of how much perspective is needed to determine whether any given event did go "right" or "wrong," and the even more complicated question of if the blame actually belongs where people lay it.

But don't you long to know what pitfalls people have fallen into, what bad turns they've taken, if only so you'll stand a better change of identifying them when you come upon them yourself? My dream would be to produce a public radio-style oral history program which features, instead of the weeping elderly, people who believe their lives "didn't pan out." Alas, until I can get a grant for that controversial project, I'm forced to observe from a distance. Only with my keen-ish eye and serviceable powers of logic can I attempt to determine the secret ingredients of failsauce.

Since we're four deep into this series, you've surely foreseen that I think this riddle's answer has to do with social ineptitude. Here's my best guess: no matter the degree of skill he possesses, the social maladroit will tend to get stuck at a point that feels to him like failure. Caveat the first: this seems to apply less to those of incandescent, once-in-a-generation brilliance. Though the world might not beat a path to his door, it's not unprecedented for, say, a herd of tech entrepreneurs to fight over an ace of a programmer who cannot communicate with his species. Caveat the second: the point of stuckness might really only feel like failure to the social maladroit stuck in it; others might see him as successful. Or he might eventually get a delayed break. Or he might get that ultimate mixed blessing, the posthumous break.

I got thinking about this a lot harder when I started thinking about B.S. Johnson. Never heard of him? Exactly. An avant-garde writer and filmmaker, Bryan Stanley Johnson spent his short life — a self-shortened life — working so very hard to transcend the formal and intellectual constraints of novels, theater and movies. Intrigued by his story as fascinatingly told by Jonathan Coe in his Johnson biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, I decided to write a primer on the man's novels for The Millions. The books are, on the whole, terrific: intellectually affecting and formally exciting. So why did Johnson wind up broke, little-known, apocalyptically despairing and dead in the bathtub?

Testimony from those who knew him reveals that, for all his writing skill and all his courtesy to those of lower status, Johnson could be a real pain in the butt to those positioned to help him. Coe paints a portrait of a sociopathically resentful man given to relentless dogmatism and pounding argumentative aggression. He burned bridges without hesitation through his decade-long career, tearing through agents and publishers at an astonishing clip. In response to every perceived slight — and he perceived many — Johnson committed verbal evisceration. ("You ignorant unliterary Americans make me puke," etc.) The bile slowly inflated him like the world's bitterest balloon. Eventually, the balloon popped.

I usually cast a dubious eye on claims about long-suffering artists who aren't getting their supposed due; these martyrs typically turn out not to be doing much worth writing home about. But I'm endlessly intrigued by obviously skilled creators who so obstinately stand in their own way. B.S. Johnson couldn't get out of attack mode long enough to see clearly. The withdrawn Nick Drake, afflicted by some sort of progressively crippling shyness, couldn't promote his albums or make meaningful contact with those who could. Orson Welles, once thought something of a golden boy, is now regarded as having pissed his goodwill away in battle after pointless battle. It couldn't have helped that all three regarded their own works as masterpieces and said so, the most autistic-seeming behavior of all these.

I've come to doubt, strongly, whether the laboring-in-obscurity problem is actually about labor. Some fans of those who labor in obscurity claim that, oh, what their idols are doing is simply too good, too hard for our philistine world; everyone knows that only dreck succeeds. (And, naturally, whatever succeeds must be dreck.) Looking around at which creators break through and which don't, I can't imagine what the work itself could explain. Much more predictive is their ability (a heavily interest-in-other-people-based one) to plug themselves into the social matrix that makes best use of their skills, no matter those skills' strength or weakness.

Those convinced that works that are "harder" or more complex or that ask more of their audience naturally can't succeed have much to explain. David Lynch and Werner Herzog, two filmmakers nobody accuses of dumbing it down, are quite successful. Can it be coincidental that, in both cases, their amiability is legend? "Everybody has fun when they work with David," says Mary Sweeney in a documentary on the making of Lost Highway. "The most affable guy ever," somebody else calls him in it. "Nobody is treated like a celebrity on my set," Herzog said in a recent interview, "but everyone gets treated like royalty."

To some of you, this stuff is totally obvious, hardly worth saying. To others, it's not worth saying because you don't feel like you'll ever in a million years bring yourself to act on it. But from what I can tell — in the parlance of the previous installment — nobody is quite so fucked as he who lacks an interest in social connection, even if he's awesome at work which itself has ostensibly nothing to do with the social world. Maybe this is the sort of thing Daniel Goleman was talking about in Emotional Intelligence. All I remember from that book is the part where the guy shoots his daughter in the neck.

Stay tuned for the thrilling Part V of The Plight of the Social Maladroit, tomorrow on The War on Mediocrity.

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part III: The Problematic of the Dale Praxis

This is the third in a five-part series. The second is here.

It's one thing to verbally parse insights dropped by the Dale Carnegies of the world; it's quite another to internalize them. I think of this as Dale's Theory-Practice Gap, or, more academically, The Problematic of the Dale Praxis. It's pretty common to read or hear an idea and think, "Hey, I'd do better if I acted on that." It's almost as common to understand the idea and think and write about it yourself; hell, that's a big chunk of what I do here. But does any of this translate to patching the idea into your own code? Hard to say.

What gets in the way? The lingering detritus that junks up all our minds, I suspect: unreasonable but unreconsidered preconceptions, plastered-over knowledge gaps, unhelpful but comfortable habits of thinking. The paranoia of the meek that sees sources of potential embarrassment everywhere. The cultural and intellectual siege mentality of the subconsciously self-considered elite. The solipsism of the once-"gifted" kid. It's this kind of nonsense that makes me wish brains had manual override switches.

Having cleared away all that stuff must be what Zen Buddhists mean by "beginner's mind," about which Shunryu Suzuki had much to say:

In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means "beginner's mind." The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind. Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen to you if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it.

[ ... ]

You should not lose your self‑sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few. If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself.

It occurs to me that a beginner's mind toward other people is exactly what the social maladroit lacks. If you keep stumbling over the fallen assumptions you've failed to juggle, you won't have a lot of attention left for pure interest. Dare I invoke the tired word "openmindedness," to which we give such unending lip service?

Just as the near-epic challenge of developing a Dale Carnegie-style "genuine interest in other people" often goes unacknowledged, it seems to me that people tend to be wrong in the same way about openmindedness — or empty-mindedness, ready-mindedness, or beginner's-mindedness, or shoshin-mindedness. Whatever you think of Zen Buddhists, at least they don't sugar-coat the struggle to attain it. The way I hear it thrown around in the mainstream, you'd think it was something you could just decide to "be."

I would submit that, like anything worthwhile, cultivating this sort of receptive mind demands actual sacrifices. I've mourned living people due to to their unwillingness or inability to understand this. If I could only frame life in one way, I'd frame it as the constant pushing outward of one's own comfort zone, with all the attendant risks. If you're not doing that, you are, in some sense, dead. With constrained interests, you're similarly dead. Without the willingness to separate your interests from your identity, from your various prejudices and from any other of the aforementioned lingering brain garbage? Dead. At least it makes me feel dead.

Note that interest ≠ admiration. Being interested in something or someone, as we all know but maybe don't often remember, doesn't mean you have to like it. But haven't you heard people hem and haw about how they're not interested in person, place or thing x because don't think they'll like it? It's a strange conflation, one that makes a kind of sense on an intuitive level but absolutely none when even casually examined. You see it happen a lot with art and culture ("Ulysses? Aw, forget it"), but I find it doubles down in plain old society. It feels so natural to avoid working up an interest in people you doubt you'll really like.

As frequently as I quote Terence on these matters, some humans, alas, remain totally alien to me: Netflix user reviewers, for instance, who seem as slow, pedantic and obtuse as they accuse most great movies of being. Social media marketers, of whose existence as sentient beings I have seen no persuasive evidence. And I'm absolutely convinced that I'd have a more fruitful discussion with an 80-year-old Dinka tribesman than an SEO consultant.

So this is all much easier said than done, but it's a problem worth working on. If there's one thing I've realized for sure about the lack of interest in developing social adeptness and an inclination for broad engagement with the outside world, it's that, to the extent that someone doesn't straighten it out, they are so fucked.

Stay tuned for the thrilling Part IV of The Plight of the Social Maladroit, tomorrow on The War on Mediocrity.

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part II: Carnegie Knew Everything

This is the second in a five-part series. The first is here.

If, like those "talented" kids who grow up lazily shielding the dubious glory of their intelligence, you buy your own hype, you might come to believe some weird things. If other people bow before the awesome power of your brain, for instance, then what could you ever stand to gain from interacting with other people? They're worshiping you, after all. You're a god to them! The assumption that you only need your projects, your own brain and maybe the friendship of the 99th percentile most like-minded and demographically similar people in your region.

I'm reminded of the Five Geek Social Fallacies, though those don't kick in until social interaction begins; this nips it in the bud. Yet it's still very much (though not exclusively) a geek problem. I've written here before about the geek tendency to simulate social competence in the same way they'd learn chess: figure out the rules, form basic strategies and memorize effective responses to recurrent situations. Hence the number of sites about how to make small talk.

The paradox in this is its fatal flaw: people seem to value your engagement with them to the extent that you're not following some operating procedure, much less instructions off a web page. Even the hopefuls committing these guidelines to memory must realize how weirded-out they'd be if someone were to ask them about their lives because about.com said to "ask them about their lives." The idea is that nobody needs to tell you to ask, because you're supposed to be interested in the first place. But it never occurs to some people — geeks, anointed children, shut-ins, what have you — to be interested in the first place.

This is only natural if, in your life so far, other people's primary function was to be impressed by you. In this worldview, your only hope to win humanity's favor is to drill down as far as possible into the soil of your brain, your projects and your like-mindeds and present to the world an image of brilliance. Hence, I suspect, the strong temptation to say effectively nothing on the net but: "Here's a thing I did. Here's another thing I did. Here's yet another thing I did." As a kid, when I was still burning my energy (such as I burned it at all) jealously guarding my smartness trophy, I didn't feel like I could spare the bandwidth to be interested in other people. It would've been like asking someone desperately flapping his limbs in the middle of the ocean to get to know the water he's treading.

In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Douglas Coupland said about his undimming fascination with everything around him, "I used to worry that my interest in the world would just wear off one day. It’s a beautiful place and we are lucky to be alive. We really are." I've written here before how someone's interestingness usually equals their interestedness. One of the gems in my meta-MetaFiltered advice, I thought, was: "When you talk to people, let them spend the bulk of the time talking about themselves. The more they talk about themselves, the more interesting they'll think you are."

This all comes back to Dale Carnegie, doesn't it? I somehow happened on his immortal How to Win Friends and Influence People in high school and, despite the book's dopey aspirational title, found that its ideas made so much sense I could hardly think directly about them. (Some say the same about evolutionary theory, but I didn't read that.) Paul Graham wrote, "When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself."

One of Carnegie's oft-repeated dicta is that you should "take a genuine interest in other people." This principle's sub-points include listening hard, urging your interlocutors to talk about themselves, etc. I seem to recall examples of an everyman complimenting a postal worker on his head of hair and a raise-seeking employee asking his boss about his stamp collection. Carnegie's critics read this as advocacy of the sleazy fakery of interest in other people; "genuine," they claim, is a mere figleaf. But geeks, often self-styled Holden Caulfields, seem to get disproportionately het up about honesty and consistency. I think that, in their minds, asking someone about their stamp collection couldn't be anything but dishonest, since it's not, like, whatever sub-sub-branch of robotics is their own passion.

But here's the thing: effective or no, I doubt Carnegie was all for this kind of charlatanism. I think he used "take a genuine interest in other people" to really mean "take a genuine interest in other people." It wasn't about putting on a show or following a set of instructions. It was about something much, much harder.

Stay tuned for the thrilling Part III of The Plight of the Social Maladroit, tomorrow on The War on Mediocrity.

The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part I: Put it Out There

The internet exploded when people started widely perceiving it as a communication device, like a telephone. Paul Graham writes about it as the point everyone grasped the net's "social applications": "This was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers." Hence your blogs, your Facebooks, your Twitters, your Orkuts, etc.

Still, the action on the net doesn't seem especially communicative to me. When I think of communication, I think of face to face conversation, a talk on the telephone, or even, yes, a back-and-forth over e-mail. When I think of blogging, tweeting or Facebooking — all of which I engage in, to various degrees — I don't think of communication. I think of talking at, not talking to. That stuff is, or has become, more about saying something really loud and hoping someone persuadable is in earshot. It's like wearing a colorful getup in a stadium and hoping to get on the Jumbotron, or floating high-powered messages in bottles. All this stuff is, quite literally, just "put out there."

Merlin Mann said something incisive, as is his wont, when I interviewed him: "In the very same way that a message CC'ed to 50 people will generally get a response from none of them, I think that when you speak to no one in particular, that's exactly who's going to listen." That seems to be true — most of the time. The problem is, a fraction of the time, a nontrivial amount of people do respond to these directionless pseudo-communiqués, especially if numbers lead their titles. A staggering amount of net.culture has come to base itself on these very same long odds.

Nightmarishly, I sometimes find myself thinking in this way: "Okay, if I just make a clever enough post in the right forum..." "Okay, if I just argue smartly enough in view of enough third parties..." "Okay, if I just make a hilarious enough tweet..." As if other people were simple organisms in a lab who exist to respond to whatever stimuli I send their way, or drops of mercury in a thermometer that measures the awesomeness of my self-presentation. If I lay it out intellectually this line of reasoning it sounds preposterous, but it appears to drive a substantial chunk of what people do on the net nonetheless.

This reminds me of the way I thought as a kid. I had the combined fortune and misfortune to grow up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when children's self-esteem was our most strategic natural resource. If you clocked in, for example, two or three ticks above the intellectual average, your environment turned on a firehose of praise for your smarts. Though I wasn't the brainiest-kid-in-the room type, I guess I showed enough promise to cultivate a reputation for intelligence. I proceeded to assiduously avoid any task difficult enough to challenge that reputation.

My experience wasn't that different from little Thomas', though he's smarter:

Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ”

Thomas said that about spelling. Spelling was one of the only things at which I was skilled, but I bowed out of a bunch of other stuff. Being in the presence of and talking to other people, for instance; I took one look at a task like that and said, "I'm not good at this." But "fortunately," because I grew up in as an only child in time and place with books, computers, television and video games aplenty, I could pretty much cut out the social stuff altogether without going sensory-deprived. And this was before the web as we know it, which must be like crack to kids with similar and worse tendencies.

I think back to how I acted then, and it's no wonder that scattershot autistic declaration has become the internet's dominant form of speech. You could hardly design a better enabling device: allow people to lob as many messages as they can type into the void, and have that void sometimes reward them with just enough of a response to imply the alluring promise of much, much more. I now can't stop seeing hundreds of thousands of childhood-Colins — or, in my moments of reversion, adulthood-Colins — hanging around the net, yammering loudly to, effectively, themselves, hoping against hope to spark a sudden mass connection.

But here's the grimmer part: I'm far less — far less — affected by these issues than a lot of people.

Stay tuned for the thrilling Part II of The Plight of the Social Maladroit, tomorrow on The War on Mediocrity.