"Hiding in plain site"

Ironic that one of the best Twitter feeds around, IMHO, is that of Alain de Botton. That's Botton like "baton" and not like "button"; yes, he's not American and yes, he's a roving philosopher of sorts. His book Status Anxiety made some very interesting, and necessary, arguments about social class, self-image, and the like. His follow-up, The Architecture of Happiness, demonstrates that even in a world where our hearts and minds are increasingly cloud-sourced online, our physical surroundings matter, and that they can-- and should -- be a point of joy.

Now you can enjoy nugget-sized bits of de Botton's brilliance on Twitter. To wit, from today:

Businesses head blithely off the cliff when no one at the top is sufficiently scared - scared enough to think properly.

or

Ashamed and bemused by our own fragility, we consistently underestimate how anxious everyone else is.

Perhaps more relevant for this blog are these two nutritious tidbits:

In modernity, our only way of imagining what strangers are like becomes the media. Amazement when s/he turns out not to be murderer.

and

Our impulse to be social is enhanced by the option to avoid others.

They're all bits of koan which land softly in the Twitterverse, to be savored and pondered at leisure. Which is frustrating, because de Botton tends to Twitter in spurts; seven tweets in the last seven hours, gah.

I'm particularly intrigued by that last tweet of his I posted here: our impulse to be social is enhanced by the option to avoid others. Which essentially describes social networking functionality. You can disconnect/ignore/flame whenever you feel like it. No need to find one of those beautiful outposts Alain describes the The Architecture of Happiness to hide out in. We are all hiding in plain site.