Despite my early protestations, I’m on twitter.  I’m followed by a lot of other twitterers. I don’t follow them back because I have no interest in buying what they’re selling.  I don’t follow them back because I don’t know who they are or have any reason to believe I want to engage in a discussion with them.  I don’t follow them back because they’re nuts, stupid, childish or just not funny.

I have a facebook account, a LinkedIn account and a Google Plus account. I never use them.

Still, I hear from a lot of people about social media.  They tell me they have to use it because this is the future.  They tell me that if they don’t, they’ll “miss the train” and all the other people who do use it will make oodles of money, take all the good cases, sell their wares, while they just sit there waiting for the phone to ring.

So I ask, “and are you making oodles of money off social media?”

No.  They’re not.  They’re spending hours of time at a stretch, chatting it up with people they don’t know who are busy trying to create bonds of trust with them so they will buy.  But nobody’s buying. Everybody’s selling.  They don’t really trust anyone, but engage in a mutual bond of desperation.  They play with disembodied characters on a screen, afraid to be so rude as to not reply for fear that this person will be the one who has the big case or will make the big purchase.  They pretend to care. Or maybe they really do care, for lack of anything real to care about. We’re reduced to caring about disembodied characters on a screen.

If only they knew that it was some kid who prays that someday they’ll have a pot to piss in, hoping that the old time lawyer will throw them a bone.  You won’t make any money off them, but you spend time away from your children for them.  This is your life?  Your future? 

While social media technically uses only a couple of our senses, the one that I use the most is my sense of smell.  I smell the stench of desperation.

Take a gander at my twitter followers.  One of the latest, a criminal defense lawyer no less, includes in his twitter bio that he has “easy payment plans.” 

Is there no dignity left?  Is there no one so shameless that you won’t do anything for a few pennies?

A few years ago, the question was how long it would take for social media to go mainstream, so bring in the majority of Americans who ignored their computers and sat on the sidelines of social media.  It was killing the early adopters, those who hoped to be social media rock stars and bask in the adoration of converted luddites.  They were so important within their inconsequential sphere, and wanted to be appreciated by the broader swathe of society that had yet to learn that they absolutely had to jump on the social media train or be left to die like the dinosaurs.

Someone else can crunch the numbers and let me know if the majority of Americans are now engaged in social media.  I don’t follow it because I don’t care.  I’m nothing more than an observer of this phenomenon.

What I observe is a nation so desperate, so shameless, so lacking in anything remotely resembling a spine or self-respect, that they have turned these tools into a black light district.

It’s not that I’m special. I’m not.  Just another guy with a twitter account, and one whose twits are remarkably unworthy of anyone else’s time.  But then, people aren’t following me because they think I will twit something pithy or witty.  They follow me because they wrongly hope I will buy whatever they’re selling.

I’m disgusted. Is that the reaction you’re trying to evoke?  Every day, this video becomes increasingly real.