Anthony Weiner is, in the immortal words of one Oscar-winning actress, so five minutes ago.  Almost a decade and a half before the instrument of Weiner’s downfall launched on July 15, 2006, that line from one of the most perceptive films of the 1990’s presciently captured the essence of modern social media.  Anyone who follows more than a handful of people on Twitter knows what I am talking about: In the space of five minutes, hundreds of tweets populate your Twitter timeline, and unless you suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, any tweet that is more than five minutes old is ancient history—unless, of course, it gets retweeted, in which case it may have a lifespan of 15 minutes or even half an hour.

Of course, if you’re a member of Congress who accidentally tweets a risqué picture of yourself for the whole World Wide Web to see, you will most likely find yourself frozen in time, living that five minutes over and over again for the rest of your public life.  That is one of the many paradoxes of social media such as Twitter and Facebook: Those moments you would most like to share with others are quickly lost in the chaos of the virtual madding crowd, while your mistakes and lapses in judgment and even, yes, sins (if such a concept can be admitted in our post-Christian world) remain forever, or at least until the Chinese bring Google to its knees (as they have been trying to do for a few years now) or Google becomes Big Brother and sends your life down the memory hole, whichever comes first.

When Hilary Swank first uttered the now ubiquitous line “It’s so five minutes ago” in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, most people were only vaguely aware of the internet, much less the World Wide Web, the internet’s graphical user interface, which had launched just a year before.  Buffy’s Valley-girl BFF was referring not to fame but fashion, but somehow the sentiment seems more appropriate than ever in our brave new online world.

Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy, has a verified account (@kristyswansonxo) on Twitter, while Sarah Michelle Gellar, the actress who replaced her four years later in the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, may be there as well.  Whether or not @sarahm_gellar is who she says she is (her account has not been verified), the contrast between their Twitter histories tells us much about the world of virtual fame: The person purporting to be Buffy the Second joined Twitter on May 21, 2009, but made her first tweet on June 21 of this year, linking to a promo of her latest TV show, Ringer, which debuts this fall on the CW.  Buffy the First joined Twitter a mere 15 days later (June 5, 2009) and made her first tweet that day:

Just hangin with my son Magnus and setting up this page. Glad to be on Twitter. xoxoxo Kristy

In the intervening years, Swanson has tweeted 1,535 times.  She follows 1,190 other members of Twitter, replies to them frequently, and retweets items she finds of interest.  As of this writing, Swanson has garnered 3,143 followers.

The person behind the @sarahm_gellar account, on the other hand, has not tweeted since her first tweet and follows a mere 54 people, with whom she has never engaged.  Yet she has 19,875 followers—all of whom, apparently, were waiting for that magic moment a few days ago when She Who Might Be Sarah decided to promote the verifiably Sarah’s new show.

But why should anyone be surprised?  Kristy Swanson is so five minutes ago.  And so, we might conclude, is the idea that social media is meant to be, well, social.

I joined Twitter (@ExecutiveEditor) on July 18, 2007, and my first tweet is lost to the ages.  About two years ago, Twitter, finding its servers overwhelmed by new users when celebrities such as Demi Moore (@mrskutcher), Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), and Oprah Winfrey (@oprah, of course) joined, began limiting the history of any user’s tweets to approximately the last 3,200.  (Three thousand tweets, it seems, is the new five minutes.)

I do know what my first tweet was not, because, unlike the former congressman from New York, I have always practiced safe tweeting: Never post anything, even privately, that you wouldn’t want your mother to see.

But, you may be wondering, why tweet in the first place?  I asked myself that for a year or more after joining Twitter.  I very rarely tweeted, because I had nothing to say in 140 characters or less that (I thought) anyone would want to hear.  I didn’t join Twitter to broadcast my thoughts (much less my private life) to the world, but to follow a handful of Mac OS X developers whose software I was beta testing.  It was an easy way to keep up with developments in their software, without cluttering up my e-mail inbox.

I first started tweeting actively (or rather, passively) when I found that I could automatically feed my latest articles from Chronicles’ website and the About.com Catholicism GuideSite (a side project of mine) to Twitter.  Readers of both Chronicles and the Catholicism GuideSite started following my account and reading the articles as they appeared.  But even then, I was using Twitter the way Ron Popeil might—set it, and forget it.

Until the day I decided as a joke to make the kind of tweet that everyone derides: I posted a picture of something that I was cooking.  It may have been a pork shoulder on the smoker; perhaps it was a Sunday-morning breakfast.  I really can’t recall.

What I do remember is that suddenly I received a number of responses: Can I have the recipe?  What spices do you use?  You’re making me hungry!  Post more pictures!

And a funny thing happened: The people who responded to the picture started retweeting, not just the picture, but the links to my online articles.  And more people started following my Twitter account and reading those same articles.

So, as an experiment, I began mixing in personal observations, linking to stories I found of interest, and replying to other Twitter users when they replied to me.  And somewhere along the way I realized I was actually enjoying the interaction.

Now, most of my Twitter followers were (and still are) people I do not know, and I would be the first to say that you cannot have a community of people who do not know one another face to face.  But then a couple of local Twitter users, Zack Kitzmiller (@zackkitzmiller) and Shawn Kelley (@shawnmk), computer geeks and entrepreneurs, organized a “Tweet-Up” at the Carlyle Brewing Company in downtown Rockford.  Several dozen local Twitter users showed up, and we drank beer and ate pizza and talked for a few hours about everything under the sun.  The Carlyle did not have free wifi (and still does not), and so the virtual realities of our online lives were put on hold, and we were forced to enjoy one another’s company.

In the two years or so since, my wife and I have become friends with a number of local tweeters, and we’ve shared many more pints of beer and even my pulled pork.  My eldest daughter is interning for Holli Connell (@RiverfrontHolli) this summer at Rockford’s Riverfront Museum Park, and my boys and I cut down a Christmas tree at the farm owned by the brother of Doug Connell (@EngineStudio).  Local Twitter users have helped each other out in rough spots, and we patronize one another’s businesses.

And in a city of 150,000 people, we (cue the orchestra) never would have met had it not been for Twitter.

It is easy for those of us who are cultural conservatives to see the downsides and the dangers of today’s virtual realities, and particularly of social media, which threaten to replace true community with a false sense of friendship that keeps us tied to our iMacs and iPhones while shunning the responsibilities of the real world.  And there is a fine line between public and private that is all too often breached on these services—though most often by celebrities who long ago gave up any pretense of having a private life.  (Demi Moore has frequently posted pictures of herself in her underwear, and John McCain’s daughter Meghan increased her Twitter followers exponentially after she tweeted pictures of her ample bosom on @McCainBlogette.)

But despite the downsides and dangers, social media is just another tool, which can be used for good or ill.  I appreciate the hard work that goes into a handcrafted printed work (Shawn Kelley has documented on Twitter his rescue and renovation of a cast-iron letterpress, on which he is now making items designed to stand the test of time), but I would not want to go back to cutting and pasting and waxing each issue of Chronicles by hand.

Behind each Twitter account or Facebook page sits a real person, but it would be a mistake to think that we know him or her because we know his or her online persona, any more than we know Kristy Swanson or Sarah Michelle Gellar because we’ve watched either incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  But in a world where true community has been attenuated by excessive mobility and the destruction of the intermediary institutions—neighborhoods, parishes, even families—that make life worth living, is it any wonder that those who find something missing in their off­line lives turn to the virtual realities that promise (often falsely) to restore a little bit of the life that their parents and grandparents were so eager to give up?