About a week ago, I got dumped. By Facebook. I’d devoted over three years of constant affection, late night procrastinating, adding the sprinkles of the usual lover spats over new formatting and exhaustive new feeding much to our mutual dismay (FB decided a filter was finally in order after two years of bitching about it). Guess he decided my ignoring the constant requests to provide my vitals wasn’t enough to continue our relationship so I got the ‘rate limit’ boot. Whatever the fuck that means. Always something with his tryna-be-complicated ass, it seemed.

Naturally, I was devastated but in true form, I quickly rallied my emotional troops in the pursuit of a new internet homey-lover-friend. It had been said that the best way to get over one social networking addiction is to get under another. I’d been entertaining Twitter but…alas, he just didn’t have the equipment to do me justice. Turns out Twit was more of a Twat. Some listserves and social networking deviations that were good enough before all of a sudden seemed kinda…tiny in comparison to my more advanced needs. Felt a little like Bilal: …this whole thing has got me searchin’…

Then, this week passed. A week sans the usual attention to who and what requested my lowly attention to whatever-have-you, without the added distraction of seeking out updates on my respective affiliations (shouts out to my neo-neos and yep, the Libertarians are still about that thing, no worries there) and certainly missing the limited satisfaction of how many people ‘big-upped’ my statuses (your LIKE’ing the fact that I’m diggin’ the last Dwele does something to me, way deep inside. Everything about you is so down, is SOOO down…).

Truth be sacrosanct, I’d missed the attention a little. Who wouldn’t miss their own standing testimony to their greatness (friend count be damned, I had some good shit on there)? This Black Girl felt a little isolated, like no one cared, no one noticed. Truth is, no one had. (Save a very, very few and for my sanity’s sake, I am so indebted).

In the midst of reviewing windy reports and analyzing social behavior programs (i.e. doing ACTUAL work because I had no choice), I began to think about what it was like before Facebook and related stepped on the scene. What did we do to prove our self worth before the advent of Myspace? Before micro-blogs and Hi5 or Ning (or Ming or whatever)? If you were unfortunate to be left out of that cyber reality, how did you navigate the changing landscape being relatively invisible? Did you? Seems like everyone else is praying to the god of ME, MYSELF AND I (but most of the time someone else)and I’m sitting here all lame, catching up on my travelling Smriti. Hell, even if you don’t have an account with ‘one of the cool kids’, you’re more than likely to be familiar with YouTube-the new-and-improved ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’, on crack, hosted by any sort of person vying for their fifteen minutes of fame, extended.

No, yours truly hardly considers herself afflicted with the condition of irrelevance, but certainly, I wonder what happens to those who are shut out giving to the masses, our self deification. The New Twilight Zone series had this episode where, as punishment for some considerably ‘heartless’ acts, a man was sentenced to invisibility for one year in the year of 2040 (or something like that-you can read the episode synopsis here) and what was so tripped out is that we’re in the dawn of that, now.

Now that social networking has taken the place of personal interface and the new ’stepping outside of the box’ entails changing your profile picture, what happens when you’re too handicapped to do either? Are we going to be like the man in the story, who couldn’t even get help after being involved in an accident, due to his deliberate ‘unrecognizability’? Or the woman who was trapped for seven years under goo-gabs of who-kn0ws-what-the-fuck-in-her house, maybe because she didn’t have access to call out for help? Maybe even that teacher who had a fugue of the worst kind, leaving her stranded and wandering for weeks at a time because she wasn’t strapped to her Blackberry to give minute-to-minute updates on her status (’going to take a shit. brb!’)? As the technology gap widens, the efforts to sustain the planet’s needs might get relegated to only who has the resources to get to the web grapevine the fastest about nonsense (think: the REAL global edition of Gossip Girl), with substance lost for hype. If you can’t pay, you for damn sure can’t play. Sure, that speculation may be more of the hyperbolic sort, but my question remains unanswered: who will speak for the quickly fading invisible man?