Beyond the Status Update, Rediscovering our Humanity amidst Social Networking Technologies

It seems to me that to be human is to experience some degree of suffering and anguish. Though, obviously this will vary from one life to another, it would be the almost inconceivable exception that a person never experienced physical and psychological pain regarding their own circumstances or the circumstances of others. Yet, it strikes me that many of our social networking technologies fail to allow for the adequate and effective presentation of suffering and anguish. Within the limited text field of a status update on Facebook or Twitter, can we ever express the depths of human feeling? It seems perverse that we might write something like "Having a bad day" when in fact, given specific circumstances (losing a job, death in the family, being mugged, etc.), our suffering and anguish extends far deeper, or at least should extend deeper. And this raises the question, do our limited status updates on applications like Twitter and Facebook function as merely shorthand that beg a question from a caring friend which would involve a much more substantial discussion and expression of our suffering and anguish? Or, do we allow the parameters of a technological application to set the boundaries on what we feel, or at least come to terms with? That is, do we fail to probe the depths of our suffering and anguish because the status update application exhibits a certain kind of authority in its mandate of succinctness? Does succinctness become the ideal, by which we then must deny the tremendous range and profundity of our feelings?

I am not sure what the answers to these questions may be, although I have some intuitions, but it is worth considering why the questions are so terribly significant. If it is part of the human experience to undergo suffering and anguish to some degree or another, and yet our technologies (particularly those technologies that claim to foster community and a sense of connection) do not offer any means by which to significantly share that experience of suffering and anguish, then we should draw into question the precise value and usefulness of the technologies. This is not to say that applications like Facebook and Twitter would not have some value, but under the aspect of what human experience involves, we would have to reconfigure and limit our beliefs about what the technologies can offer us. Although social networking technologies have brought us into far greater connection with greater numbers of people than ever before, it is not immediately clear that they have allowed us to connect with one another as human beings, that is, as individuals that experience joy and pain, pleasure and anguish, peace and suffering.