It started with not feeling well one Sunday morning – stuffy sinuses, sore throat and cough. I had a number of things to get done so I set to work without checking into Twitter. As I was going about my manual tasks I had plenty of time to think. What if I never went back to my social networking sites? What if, for some reason, I couldn't?

Before you starting thinking I am being morbid and melodramatic consider my sister had a stroke and aneurysm when she was exactly my age. She has neither worked nor lived independently since and she has lost her ability to communicate with all but her daughter. I've somewhat dreaded this year of my life and look forward to getting past it.

I've seen a few articles about setting up a contingency plan to inform one's social network in the event of a personal emergency. They suggest giving a trusted loved one passwords so they may communicate on your behalf. Since I am on many different sites and change my passwords regularly this is impractical. I suggest keeping a list of the sites you frequent, the email addresses attached to them and the passwords for those email addresses. Make sure your loved one keeps this information locked up in a safe place. If it becomes necessary, they can retrieve your password information through your email.

But that is not what this post is about.

My thoughts continued to wander to the point of wondering, if I disappeared would anyone in my virtual network notice? If so, who? Would it be who I would expect? When would they notice? I decided to perform an little experiment to find out and then write about my findings.

I checked my Twitter profile to make sure none of my recent tweets would cause concern. One of my Twitter friends has been missing since October. I know from his tweet stream he was headed out to a birthday party that night. I truly hope nothing happened to him. My stream appeared clean of any such red flags.

To get a sense of how likely it would be that anyone would notice my absence it should be noted that www.howoftendoyoutweet.com indicates I tweet or otherwise feed into my tweet stream an average of 86 times per day. Since this is an average it would not be unusual for me to only tweet ten times during the course of a day but to tweet nothing is unusual for me. This means I also had to avoid sending Twitpics, commenting on blogs, posting to my Posterous site or Flickr, sending emails or text messages or doing anything else that would indicate my presence on the web. After the first day I dreamed I accidentally retweeted someone while watching Twitter so I stayed off the computer after that.

Similar to many detractors of social media, I agree it is often a narcissistic pursuit. How else does one justify exposing one's activities, ideas and interests to random strangers if not to get some validation? I'm constantly amazed anyone cares enough to respond to me on the internet but then again, they are likely seeking validation in return. A certain amount of narcissism is healthy but I'm under no illusion people have my blog on a reading list or hover over my Twitter profile page waiting to see a twitpic of my lunch. Thus I was a little surprised when I received my first text message, noting my absence, Sunday night.

After this I heard nothing until Tuesday when I received another text message from a different person. Later on Tuesday I received another text from a third person. I debated what to do about these messages. I didn't want to skew the results of my experiment but it was also not my intention to unduly alarm anyone. I decided to message these three people, tell them what I was doing and ask them to pretend they had not heard from me. They thanked me and agreed to say nothing. On Wednesday I received an email from a fourth person indicating he and a fifth person were concerned about me and asking if there was anything they could do for me. I thanked them for their concern and filled them in on what I was doing. That afternoon I received another text from a sixth person but she seemed more curious than concerned so I didn't think I needed to reassure her by responding. A seventh person texted me late Wednesday night and I let her know what I was doing. She is the only one who sent a message to both my Twitter accounts. In addition to these seven people my Twitter replies tab shows me five other people noticed I was not tweeting – one on Monday, one on Tuesday, two on Wednesday and one on Thursday. This is a total of eleven people (six women and five men) or .18% of the people who openly follow my movements on the internet. Of these eleven people only three have met me in person and none were members of my family.

I can not say I am surprised by these results. A phrase of my Mother's comes to mind - “out of sight, out of mind.” I have several virtual friends I am concerned about because I have not heard from them in a while but after searching the web for activity from them there is only one who has completely dropped off the map. Also, I've only been inactive for five days. That is enough time for twenty people to unfollow me but not quite enough time for anyone to bury me.

One thing I learned from this is, I do not need a contingency plan in case anything happens to me. As long as a few people have my phone number they can text my phone and my partner can let them know what is going on. I may take the time to teach him how to respond to a Twitter DM sent to my phone but that should be sufficient. I may give his phone number to a couple people as a backup, in case anything happens to my phone, but anything more than that is exaggerating my importance to my social networking community.

What do you think of the results of my experiment? Would you have performed it differently? Would you be satisfied with these results from your own virtual community? Let me know your thoughts.

(Special thank yous go out to Rhonda, Rosy, Scott, Brendyn, Don, Amy, Margaret, Marcy, Paul, Ralph and Sarah for wondering where I was. You guys are the best!)

(Image courtesy of http://www.punchstock.com)

Attentive people on Twitter have heard me speak of Timmy. He is fifty years old and child like but never unintelligent. He is the one who always laughs, "I have clowns in my belly!." I'm pretty sure he does..

Last year Timmy asked me to make him a scarf and I did. I really like Timmy's no nonsense way of asking for things. I never doubt where I stand with him. I could have told him "no" and he would have been fine with that, too. When I presented the scarf to Timmy he was thrilled. He loved the color and texture and the personalized name tag saying it was made especially for him. He wore it proudly as we parted. I never saw it again. I asked him about it on one particularly cold day. Timmy's head drooped and he said he lost it.

That was last year. This year Timmy asked if I'd make him another scarf. I laughed at him and told him I'd buy him a scarf if he needed one. But Timmy really wants one of my scarves so he admitted he gave the previous one to a homeless person. He told me the whole story. It was typical Timmy. It was freezing cold. He had a place to go but the homeless man did not so it made sense to give him the scarf so he could be a little warmer. Timmy knows I've been homeless and have a sensitivity for people in that situation but I also know there are people you can help and people who don't want practical help. I've no idea which type this homeless man was but he could have been just as warm with a five dollar scarf as he was with the one it took me days to crochet. I told Timmy I would be happy to give him a store of scarves for that situation but he is right, the man was cold RIGHT THEN and needed warmth.

Tonight he came up to me and reminded me about the scarf. I told him I am halfway through with his and I will give him that and another half dozen if I never have to hear about the scarf again. He smiled with that smile that told me that was not what he came to talk about.

Timmy told me he was walking on a frigid night such as tonight but it was twenty years ago, when he made six figures and he was a software engineer. He was in a hurry. A homeless man asked him for a dollar. He gave him five dollars. The homeless man was overwhelmed by his generosity and gave him a garbage bag.  Timmy was surprised to get anything in return for his five dollars so he gave the man another hundred. Timmy told me how he has carried that garbage bag with him from home to home and never forgotten about that night.

Timmy says he keeps the garbage bag near his bed with his cross and rosary. When his friends are going through bad times he prays for them at this alter he has made and every time his prayers have been answered. Timmy has a lot of faith in that garbage bag he has carried for twenty years. It is his treasure. After he told me the story he explained he never wears jewelry, not even a watch. He was firm on this fact. Then he pulled out from his shirt a cross and rope braided from a garbage bag. "I just felt I had to wear it tonight and tell this story," said Timmy. I confirmed with him the garbage bag is still in the same condition as when he received it.  Timmy nodded and told me. "This is my one hundred and five dollar cross."

(Picture: Timmy's garbage bag.)