Even in a small town in South Texas, you see them. People who walk through the grocery store, narrating the products on the shelf to some guiding force who will help them select the appropriate box of cereal from amid a sea of carbohydrate choices. People who text when they are bored, like in church or at work or in line at the bank, as if they need to share their sense of boredom with some distant reader. Now you see them online, folks who tweet every action and certain random thoughts. If you take pictures of these things, you can put them on Facebook.

I call it the Narrated Life. The idea is that no matter how ordinary, simple, boring, or superficial your life is, you can put the most sophisticated technology the human race has ever known to inflict a constant account of it on people who have the misfortune to know you.

This flagrant abuse of technological capability was first obvious to me in Wal-Mart. I am blessed with exceptionally good hearing. In fact, I can hear conversations that take place some distance away from me to which I truly ought not be listening. This is usually not a problem except in large stores where other people jibber jabber incessantly. There was a time when such conversations took place only among people actually present. With cell phones came the possibility of talking to somebody who was not there.

Have you ever heard a cell phone conversation in Wal-Mart? They are acts of pure narration, punctuated with occasional inquiries that make you feel sorry for the questioner. A man wants to know if he should buy the big bag of Cheetos or the little bag and then has to define those adjectives in more objective terms for the person on the other end of the phone. A young woman announces that she has just arrived at Wal-Mart at the exact same moment another young woman calls a friend to reveal that she has just left Wal-Mart. Somebody else will pick up the phone and share the fact that they cannot find the digital camera they’re looking for at Wal-Mart and may very well try another store. I have heard people use a cell phone at Wal-Mart to complain that they could not find salespeople to help them.

Facebook is another way of inflicting every event in your life on other people but it is best rendered in photos. However, you can also tell Facebook that you went to a Tupperware party or bought a funny coffee mug or wish it would snow. If you have a lot of friends you get long streams of messages, all narrating one’s own life.

Then came Twitter which at least offers the comfort that messages have to be abrupt and short. However, you can still tweet narrations of your life, such as the fact that you’re having your morning coffee, just saw a turtle, or hope to see this or that new movie.

The confluence of these technologies is that everybody is talking and nobody is listening. And nobody is listening because everybody is too busy narrating the most painfully boring aspects of their lives and, by virtue of the technological achievement of having it blasted to the universe, what ought to seem oppressively tedious takes on at least a shimmer of significance.

And isn’t that what everyone wants: significance?

So many folks are busy narrating their lives: it’s easy to find accounts of trips to the grocery store, conversations with bosses, dinner at a restaurant, going to get the car tires checked, somebody’s nervousness about an impending exam, and on and on. What is really tough to find is anything worth reading.

Of course, nobody is actually reading this stuff. We’re all so busy producing it that nobody has the time to read it. And if we ever did read it, we’d stop in a hurry because, well, it’s boring. Who cares if you bought Captain Crunch instead of Coco Puffs? I’m not even sure what kind of cereal I bought the other day, much less the kind of cereal your kids are eating.

The Narrated Life is going to lead to several things. First of all, it will teach a whole generation how to keyboard really fast, including using just thumbs. Second, it will discourage people from listening to anything or anybody because the operative word in the narrated life is "narrated." Narrators talk (or text or write or tweet). Third, it will encourage narcissism or, perhaps more aptly put, discourage any trends to oppose narcissism in our society.

A few months back I heard a newscaster, one of those network news anchor types, talk about Twitter. He did not use Twitter and did not even really see the point. And he said what I thought was very interesting: he said he did not do anything worth reporting, not in the sense of short text blasts throughout the day. Now this is a man who has an important job that puts him in touch with world leaders and on the very pulse of the latest-breaking stories in America. And he said he couldn’t think of anything to tweet during the day, beyond things like he was at work or on the phone or looking up something online or writing a story for the evening news. That, to him, seemed too trivial to mention.

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