There's no polite way to reject an unwanted hug. You can keep your outstretched hand stiff and stick it into the stomach of the onrushing hugger, you can push them away, or you can simply say: "Please don't hug me." But whatever you do, you're going to cause offence.
We haven't evolved a polite and easy hug rejection, perhaps because the pandemic of hugging is relatively new, but we need one, and fast. If one more complete stranger tries to hug me I am going to punch them in the mouth and cause a scene.
I'm not a buzz-killing prude. The reason I don't want you to hug me on our very first meeting ever is because you won't ask me if you can. You'll just come at me with an intention to deny me my personal space, dominate me physically, engulf me with sentimentality, and ultimately condemn me as conservative if I protest.
The rise of the unsolicited hug has been phenomenal, led in most part by affirmation fanatics like rudderless housewives who set their course by the moral and behaviour al compass provided by Oprah. It has become the air-kiss of the middle class, handed out as freely as declarations of love or self-help books given out by talk-show hostesses.
It seems incongruous to begin a discussion of the digital social networking phenomenon with an indictment of hugs. At first glance they seem to be quite different things. Hugging is supposed to be an intimate act between two individuals.
Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are herd voyeurism. And yet the two are symptoms of the same social disease sweeping through the Westernised middle class: the plague of bankrupt, hollow intimacy; of banality masquerading as worthiness, and above all, a burning need to be loved. To be Somebody.
My brief was to consider this new world where we e-mail our mate in the next cubicle instead of talking to them, where hearts are poured out via text messages between lovers who can't even include vowels. "Digital intimacy" seemed a good description for this new social norm, and armed with bile I wrote a stinging indictment of this false intimacy that leaves us as distant and cold as a forgotten star from its nearest neighbour.
Then I Googled the phrase, just to make sure I'd thought of everything. It turned out I had, but so had an American journalist called Clive Thompson. He'd written my article in The New York Times Magazine. He'd even coined the same phrase: digital intimacy had leapt continents, and thanks to Google, I had become digitally intimate with how nearly I had committed an appalling tautology, if not innocent plagiarism.
So why persist, after an august publication like Thompson's has produced a fairly definitive piece on digital intimacy? Because, to mangle the overused cliché, evil triumphs when good men do nothing (or back away from a topic because The New York Times did it first).
And then there were the odd little bonbons that slipped through unchallenged. Tech geeks were quoted at some length in Thompson's piece, using those curiously macho phrases that tech geeks use, things like "pushing the envelope" and other pursuits enjoyed by test pilots and lion tamers. And then came the eyebrow-raiser.
Describing the invention of the Facebook News Feed, a system that plastered personal minutiae onto the pages of all one's friends whether they wanted to know it or not, Facebook pioneer Mark Zuckerberg explained it was precisely the addition of the News Feed that had catapulted the social networking site from a niche university tool into a global phenomenon. He said people had been uncomfortable at first, but that this discomfort was "just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of".
I dispute this claim. I believe what he witnessed was social norms conforming to what technology insisted they should look like. Indeed Zuckerberg himself seems to betray his true opinion of those people who obey social norms: "catching up" doesn't so much imply a populace exploring new possibilities as it does a herd trotting obediently after its cyber-shepherd.
But our unthinking enslavement to technology should not be news to us. Consider your lounge, a place reserved for the meeting of minds, arranged zombie-like around the television. Recall this morning's conversation halted in mid sentence to answer a cellphone. What is new, however, is the belief that technology, and specifically digital technology, can enhance the life of the mind or the heart. You don't pretend that your television helps dinner-time conversation. You always feel a twinge of guilt breaking off your conversation to answer your phone. But digital intimacy persuades its confidants that wrong is right, that isolation is inclusion, and that banality is insight.
The New York Times article went into some depth explaining - and explaining away - the culprits behind the trend. Something called "ambient awareness" seems to be the driving force behind trivia-mongering applications like Twitter: an addictive god-like illusion that you know what everyone is doing all the time, and that it somehow means something.
The apologist tone of the American piece stopped short of naming spades: it wouldn't have been wise to tell a key demographic that they're all idiots who need to get out more. But you can't hide desperate isolation and delusion behind sexy sociologist-speak. You say "ambient awareness", I say worker drones, listening to the distant buzz of a thousand other drones scattered across the anonymous hive, creating a fiction that they are slightly less alone.
All this is not to deny that some digital intimacies seem to have merit in the real world. Reaching surreptitiously under the tablecloth at a dull dinner to text a sweet nothing to your partner feels positively conspiratorial, and seems to be endowed with a genuine sense of intimacy and romance. It's rude but also gallant: if you were nipping under the table for a fag you'd be rightly pilloried, but to opt out of the conversation for love - well, that's noble.
Likewise, exchanging faintly flirtatious bits of fluff via e-mail with the hotty on the other side of the room, while you both resolutely refuse to make eye contact or exchange more than a terse hello or goodbye, has its charms. But these are still predicated on two humans sharing the same human space, either now or later when you get home. They are simply modern forms of the letter delivered by a manservant that formed the bedrock of Jane Austen's romances. The trouble arises when we erode real intimacy, with all its complexities, harsh truths and deep rewards, in favour of incessant gabble that allows us to remain largely untouched, floating in a non human space.
Thompson's article ended with its colours firmly pinned to a digital mast, quoting one Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant, who said that constantly updating her status online had made her "a happier person, a calmer person" because she said updates forced her to frame a "horrid morning at work" more objectively.
Apparently Laura didn't want to ask herself whether anyone who is a social-media consultant can ever be happy or calm in the first place. Isn't Laura's endorsement a little like having a crack addict assure us that crack makes them "a happier person, a calmer person"? After all, just because it makes you feel okay, it doesn't mean you are okay.
Somebody didn't get hugged enough. Or maybe she got hugged too much.
- Eaton is a columnist and author
