The Price of Things

Cairo Costs of Travelling:

• The price of a meal with kalbi barbecue, jook gae jang, and spicy squid (with a couple of Cokes and all the trimmings) at (one of) the only Korean restaurant in Cairo: $30.  Included were 12% service charge and 10% tax.  For a monopoly in cuisine, that's pretty good.
• The price of a chicken sandwich, a hamburger, fries, and a Coke: $2.
• The price of 2 hours of Internet usage: 66 cents.
• The price of smoking one hookah/shishah/nargileh pipe (about 40 minutes with the charcoal refilled once): 33 cents.
• The price of a taxi ride across town (20 minutes in rush hour): $1.
• The price of a fresh mango shake and a milkshake at a Western coffeehouse: $5.

More on costs:

I'm going through connectivity withdrawal. Or maybe it's a backlash.  Am I the only one who is tired of the need – the incessant hype and peer-driven demand for social networking, business networking, profit networking, connectivity, keeping in touch, extending touch, etc. etc. la la la la. 

There was a moment (today) where I was like "Woa, step back a minute". 

Here is my beef -- it's with two things about our connected world.

1) Who (and what) are we connecting to? Friends? Business associates? People we want to utilize for career gains, profit gains, emotional gains later on?  Emotional deadweight? I mean, for a person like me who has a problem with letting go of relationships (especially with exes -- I dunno.. maybe they help my emotional ego), all the tools (3 email accounts, Friendster, Myspace, not to mention all the other cool networks that I, being the behind the times person that I am, have yet to sign up for) available for me to keep in touch makes it so simple to have things drag on. 

I find something disingenuous and disagreeable (and whole lot of other disses) about business networking – the various functions at different happy hour gatherings where the sole purpose is to grab a couple more names for the blackberry address book.  "Hey, how's it going? How's your family? How's uh.. what was your kid's name again? Uh.. how bout them Yankees" – yeah, those functions. It's a norm in the crowd I travel with – scheduling lunches to be introduced (one party flatters, the other boasts), to wheedle yourself into different 'nodes of interaction'.

But that's the who – and the what?  What are we connecting to? How many blogs do I keep up with daily – and how many of them influence my life positively or meaningfully in any way? Gossip rags, fashion news, rants of dispossessed and Napoleon-complexed pundits.  We may be connected to a whole load of information, but who's to say that most of it is not shit?

2) Why are we striving to be more connected? In the professional racket, it's career suicide to be the lone gun, the deviant who wants to go it alone.  Collaboration, group-efficiencies, and levering all the tools necessary/all of the capabilities available through our peers are the rigeur du jour. It's probably fear that keeps me connected – if I don't, I'll fall behind, how can I get that coveted job (one of the few that hasn't been siphoned off by outsourcing).  Or maybe it's helplessness.  The apparatus in which we live is too huge to tackle – like a ball of yarn twisted into mangled knots, our connections entangle us in a web of push-pull, favors-requests, costs-benefits.  If there's no way out, then maybe it's easier to resign ourselves to the game, the endless see-saw of "who's done what lately" and "who's above below in front behind me" paranoia.

Perhaps we think we're more interesting because we're connected to these things.  Hey, no one has the life of a Hilton or a Simpson or even a Depp, but if they get a daily fix of the going-ons of those satellites, maybe some of the glamour and hype and glitz will rub off... Or maybe we think interestingness comes from the interests themselves.  I may not be into photography that much, but if I keep up with the photography blogs and social networks and e-mags, it can seem like that I really am into photography. For me, interests in cooking and politics and travel writing and interior design fall into the same pot.  I may be interested in these things, but does that make me any more substantial?

Take a look at your bookmark or bloglines or RSS feeds or whatever it is that plugs you in each day.  What and who are you connecting to? And why?

Here's a thought for myself. Do something. Enjoy photography? Take pictures.  Enjoy people? Make friends. I suppose, I find sincerity (that slippery word) missing in all this connectivity.  Instead, I find a lot of displaced hubris, a little dose of pathetic self-help, and a smidgen of wacked out paranoia lemmings over the ledge kind of group-think.

But then again, I may be totally wrong (in an isolated Unabomber kind of way).  What is the price for disconnection?

[end rant]