“I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.” – Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.
It’s strangely comforting knowing that Salinger got our future so right. The quote from Salinger might explain a lot about the motivations behind the usage of a lot of web 2.0 tools. Perhaps it’s not the connection but the promotion that people get out of it. Certainly, connections are important, vital even, to life. But is that what we want when we tweet, or update our facebook? Do we want a connection, or do we want our fifteen minutes of fame? Are there times where we might want one and not the other? Does the near limitless connections we make create fame? We’ve seen that in blogger-land, where certain blogs have enough followers that the person behind them become celebrities of sorts. In that case, is Perez Hilton really making connections or just making statements?