You’re an antisocial bunch – and while we may cross paths in our adventures afield, none of you have waved me over and breathlessly insisted I fish, “…right here, I just caught three big SOB’s, and help yourself to my flies, you hungry?”

With all the imponderables that is modern angling – social networking is merely apoplexy in 140 characters or less.

 

Both vendors and the angling media are flocking to these sites in droves, and the result is understandably poor. Which Grade B movie graces their TV screen and what sharp object the baby just ate – intermixed with cutesy links to off topic material and a dearth of fishing information.

Not surprising for a medium popularized by the entitled offspring of the attention deficit MTV crowd, not us aging boomers. Simply put, we don’t know what to do, other than to build a presence.

I’d think the social networking stuff would be well suited for fishermen as we excel at non-verbal communication; grunts, hand signals, pantomime, and thrown objects.

But with 98,000 known sexual predators removed from MySpace in the last month, I’m not comfortable discussing a potential trip with “BigBob,” the fellow that keeps messaging me about the Trinity River. Sure, he claims he’s got a cabin on the bank and insists May is the best time – but I’m wondering why his profile mentions a trapeze, lubricants, and the airy spaciousness of his soundproof basement.

Which fly you’re tying is great, the river you’re fishing this weekend is better, but your mood is akin to mine … inconsequential. When fishing it’s a mixture of optimism laced with reality, and the fact that you waded through my fish to inquire has changed it to pissed.

The real value of social networking is to serve up your eyeballs to vendors and vendor spam. That’s why both vendors and the blog crowd are headed there by the bushel. Space limitations ensure no real information is passed between author and reader, but there’s plenty of space to exploit your eyes from both host company and the ravenous offshore hordes trying to make a buck.

Considering that 95% of all email sent on the Internet is spam, social networking is the unguarded portal to millions of impressionable eyeballs, whose metric of popularity is the size of their friends list. Auto-acceptance of these unknown “friends” ensures that 75% of your messages are from LL Bean or similar spam source.

The other 20% are gorgeous babes searching for me specifically. Unknown to me, I’m legend in both the Eastern Bloc and the Orient, and the young ladies on those continents insist on personalizing my Facebook/ MySpace / Twitter experience if only I’d surrender my credit card number first. You’ll endure the installation of three Trojan horses and identity rape, but a girl that loves fly fishing is worth all that, right?

You create the content, someone else gets rich, and you get spammed by fly shops, video producers, bloggers, and Albanian peasant girls who’ve accumulated an extensive Victoria Secret collection despite the drudge of milking cows and churning butter.

It’s failure on an epic scale, and for obvious reasons; a Tweet book report on Homer’s Odyssey and a Louis L’Amour western reads the same:

He rode into town, he shot up the town, chicks dug it

… and the more traditional, “the Internet assaults us with reams of information, much of which isn’t reliable, and we’re evolving from digital overload to selective feeding.”

We adore fishing because it allows us to unplug. For the moment the piney woods lacks Internet jacks, wireless hubs, and porn. It won’t last much longer, but dammit – I like it that way.

Doubly unfortunate because my job is to bring those communication networks into the woods … I create what I do, and destroy the thing I love – all with a twist of a screwdriver.

I assume this lust for phrases is a logical derivative of the sound bite. Condense a president’s speech into a single sentence, then splatter that all over as the essence of his 90 minute oratory. Now we’ll distill the soundbite into a tweet – so any real meaning is lost.

Twitter is a great tool to send hyperlinks of decapitations to an unsuspecting buddy, he can respond in kind hoping you’re the first to throw up. It’s a great place to have your pals send you their favorite porn links so they’re not intermingled with your spouses email.

Despite these seeming “advanced” tools, they cannot convey enough information to sustain interest – what with all the other communication tools available.

Anglers are blowhards and orators whose bully pulpit includes tailgates and dusty parking lots, we require a couple pages of windy before we can really tell you how big that fish was …

Full Disclosure: The author has both a Facebook and Twitter site, created in the interest of science, and of no lasting value.