Reply #4: Let's begin.

[westerebus]

Obsession is not a healthy trait. In the keeping of habits that affects our inner life, the pursuit of knowledge in general is healthy, while the need to share our inner life seeking acknowledgment is risky business.

I don't know everything. I'm comfortable with that. My interests are varied. I seek information and have for as long as I can recall. As an introvert, I draw strength from silence. So it is not in my nature to seek an audience. Conversely, I seek the information I do not possess from the widest audience possible.

Ego centric self obsession is what I see all around me. I don't consider that intimacy. On the contrary, it's fraudulent narcissism under the guise of sharing. Far too many egos in need of preening by their digital best friends.

On the other side of the equation, I see an obsession with connection as if connection is by default the accepted normal response to technology. The off oneness is the identity found @___.com. Hence the conditioning of voting for # as solo performer by tex ting ### now.

This is Pavlov on steroids. The sharing of the collective in the connection. The dog barks, the light goes on, the collective votes. The information is then shared after commercial break insuring the feedback loop is completed.

None of what I just said my be true. Anonymity is a falsehood surrounded by a posture seeking an audience it has no intention of being honest with. With out honesty information suffers. Injecting distrust or misplaced concern is not an improvement in information sharing either.

You are free to remove the last paragraph. It is false as it applies to me in this case. The point is what can you trust? Is the information valid? How would you know, unless you're willing to accept the Freudian slip of the picture posed at the end of the OP as I did?

I chose to critique the photo to share information I thought valid. Your honest representation of what you had concluded. I'm in agreement there is some thing lacking. We are in a electronic society that grows less connected each day. How does one connect internally if not by self examination? How frail we have become to judge our collective by a standard unwilling to turn off the connection in fear of a blank screen. What have we become?

What description is justified of those who are lurkers? Intimate does not come to mind.