Photo: Jeroen van Oostrom, freedigitalphotos.net
If eavesdropping were an Olympic sport, I would have a gold medal and a sponsorship deal with Verizon. Can you hear me now? I sure hope so! From the time I was very young I’ve been ridiculously fascinated by other people’s conversations.
One of my earliest memories is sitting in the hallway (after being sent to bed) and snooping on the adult conversation at my parent’s dinner parties. I didn’t understand half of what they were talking about-Harvey Wallbangers, Mia Farrow, Dick and Liz-but that didn’t stop me from wanting to listen.
When I read the Harriet the Spy and Nancy Drew books I started keeping an eavesdropping notebook, dotting my i’s with little hearts and writing down interesting snippets of conversation I overheard. Despite my lack of skill in martial arts and Mandarin, I think I would have been a great CIA Agent. Going on stakeouts, drinking stale coffee, cracking wise with colleagues and writing things down sounds like great fun to me. I absolutely love to observe and report.
I was once sure I had uncovered a huge murder-suicide-extortion plot at the Good Earth Restaurant, where I overheard a couple of guys in an adjacent booth talking about babes, blood and bribes-until I saw the movie on Lifetime Television. So much for my spy skills; that’s probably why I became a journalist.
I always ask people what they would want to do if they could be invisible. It floors me when people say they’ve never thought about this. Seriously? Never. I think about invisibility several times a day. It’s always been my preferred superpower and I often imagine how much fun it would be to be a fly on the wall in other people’s lives. An invisible fly with big ears.
I just like to listen to other people. Their voices, their slang, what they say and what they don’t say but so clearly communicate with their body language. I can’t get enough of it. At heart I’m a peeper, a lurker, a voyeur.
Reuters writer Christinne Muschi complains about “the social media arms race,” and bemoans that “Somehow, somewhere, we all want to know, minute by minute, what each other is doing … Do we? I can understand some of the occasional useful aspects of networking and canvassing large amounts of people instantly, but to me most twittering is voyeurism cloaked as social networking, navel gazing re-cast as information gathering.”
Where’s the downside? I find much of it fascinating.
It’s not always the content of the communication that interesting to me-I can only handle so many stories about pets and mean bosses, and most Reality TV talk bores me to tears-sometimes it’s the context. Like when members of Congress were tweeting during the middle of the President’s last State of the Union address-apparently they need to have that movie theater reminder posted: “Please refrain from the use of cell phones during the following presidential presentation.”
The new-ish phenomenon of paying for tweeting puts this kind of communication in another light entirely. The Daily Beast reported that Kim Kardashian (who is famous for being uh, famous I guess) commands $10,000 per post on Twitter. At 71 bucks a character I would think she’d be able to come up with something more interesting than, “Have u guys ever tried Popchips? They are kind of amazing!” and “Look who joined me for my Carls Jr Facebook lunch!!!”
That’s almost enough to make me swear off Twitter the same way I did live television, since now I can time shift via DVR and skip through commercials with my TV remote.
I guess I’m saying they need to invent a social media where people don’t know that they’re posting bits of their lives. And I’m exempt from participating, but still get to watch and listen. And I’m an invisible fly who dots her i’s with hearts. And there’s a gold medal for me. That’s all I’m saying.