ABC. Always Be Closing.

That’s the advice that Alec Baldwin’s character gives to a roomful of ragged salesmen in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

Always Be Closing. The same message could easily apply to almost everyone who shares on the web. We’re all trying to close. We want to close our potential employers, our readers, our buyers, our friends, and sometimes, even ourselves.

Maybe you’re sending around a resume on LinkedIn, describing yourself on a dating site, or (ahem) posting a link back to your blog post on Twitter. But these are just the concrete examples. You might be selling an opinion, or a joke, a political ideology, a favorite television show or even a photo of your kids at the top of a ski slope.

When I post a photo of my two year-old daughter on Facebook, I expect likes. I expect comments about how cute she is. And if I don’t get them, I consider the sales-effort to be a failure. Maybe it’s my camera skills. Maybe the timing of my posts is off. Or maybe it’s my two year-old. Sure, everyone in my family likes to think she’s the cutest little button in the whole wide world. But the numbers don’t lie. Come on little girl, either you smile bigger or Daddy’s gonna have to break out the Photoshop.

I need you to know how full my inbox is, how great my marriage is, and what an awesome workout I had this morning.

Friend Me. Follow me. RT me. Like me. @ Me. Poke me. Forward me. Buy. Buy. Buy.

We used to be more subtle in our acts of self-promotion. During a conversation, maybe we’d drop an aside about a recent achievement or put a sticker on our bumpers proclaiming our kid’s status as an honor student.

In part, this subtlety was a reaction to difficulty of the task. It’s not so easy to sell yourself in person. It takes guts to make a pitch and have to watch the realtime response of the person sitting across the table. It’s a lot harder to ask someone out on a date when they’re a few inches away than it is to drop them a text.

It’s also a lot easier to be on the receiving end of a web pitch rather than facing a seller in the terrestrial world where there is no ignore button.

In Glengarry Glen Ross, Baldwin’s character explains what it takes to really sell: Brass Balls.

On the web, no such anatomic abnormalities are required. Self-promotion is as easy as clicking the publish button.

The social web changes the entire selling equation. There’s no more emotional friction associated with a sales job. The age of subtlety is dead. So we all push the product nonstop and the product is us. I know plenty of former Luddites who have been forced onto Twitter and Facebook by their employers or PR people. And they’re all here now, for one reason and one reason only. This is where you sell. Sure, they start by doing the minimum. A tweet about their company. A facebook post about an upcoming appearance. Then they see how easy it is and they get sucked in. And like the rest of us, they start selling everything.

Read my book. Buy my art. Check out my profile. Like my blog. Share my tweet. This is an article you might like. Here’s a nice picture. Check out my company’s new product. Here’s a creative pun I felt like tweeting.

You buying it?

Wait, don’t answer that. I already know because I’ve checked the stats. I share on the web and then I habitually check to see how well what I shared is performing by counting the number of clicks, likes, retweets and comments I get. You want reads? You know how many people are clicking. You want to move products? You have instant access to your sales numbers. You want attendees? Look at your RSVPs on Evite. You want laughs. Just check how many retweets and LOLs you get.

Like millions of others, I have become an expert at analyzing these statistics. I know how well I’m selling. And I know who’s selling better.

I’ve often been surprised by the personal medical details that some people are willing to share on the web. I’d never do that. Is it because I think the data is too personal or is it because I’m just worried that my disease will get fewer retweets than the next guy?

Ever pause before sharing a picture of your kid to ask yourself, “I wonder if this particular shot really does much to build our family brand?”

Critics of the social web complain that they don’t want to hear about what you had for breakfast.

It’s not about what you had for breakfast. It’s about how well what you had for breakfast is selling.

And your hotcakes might be selling like hotcakes. But maybe that’s the problem. We’re all selling so many things, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the buyers to figure out the best products you have to offer. There is no separation of the really good stuff from the rest of the items on the sales rack. Does the French Toast you had for breakfast really deserve a position on the same shelf as your writing, your career or your kids? As a buyer, I can’t answer that question. Everything about you is priced to move.

As we all become increasingly overwhelmed by the constant deluge of our always-on marketplace, it might make sense to pick and choose what we want to sell. Maybe that’s the new advice that should be given to social media’s ragged group of salespeople:

Sometimes be closing.

The latest Pew Internet study indicates that Internet users are more likely to be socially engaged and active partipants in groups than non-Internet users. The folks over at ReadWriteWeb provided a reaction to the survey that’s representative of much of what I’ve seen on the web.

That old stereotype that Internet users are isolated and anti-social is getting harder and harder to justify … Internet users are actually more active in voluntary groups and organizations than non-Internet users.

This data is hardly groundbreaking. More than a year ago, news sites were reporting on another Pew report that indicated that people who use social networks are more likely to be social in real life too.

Fears that the Internet and other personal technologies are making Americans socially isolated are unfounded…

People who use the Internet … and social networks benefit from being more likely to have a larger, more diverse core of close confidants.

While many tech journalists like to set up a strawman argument suggesting an old stereotype about Internet users being anti-social and isolated, I’ve never actually heard anyone try to make that case.

First, just about everyone you might compare yourself to is an Internet user at this point. The biggest Luddites I know are following me on Twitter and suggesting books that I should download to my Kindle. When is the last time you were at a social event and heard someone say, “The Internet, eh? Never use it. Tell me more.”

Second, it makes perfect sense that people who tend to engage with other people online would have carried that trait over from their offline lives. Social networks are not a great place to be alone. Why would they attract users who tend to be socially or civically isolated?

We’re focused on the wrong question. We should be less worried whether Internet users are socially engaged in the real world and more worried about the quality of those social interactions.

The Internet is an ideal way to connect with others, organize groups and plan terrestrial gatherings. The problem is that when we get together, we bring the Internet with us.

Next time you’re sitting in a theater before a movie starts, see how long it takes before everyone is staring at their phones. When I go to a cafe, I see tables of people who have their heads down, eyeballs locked on a device or laptop screen. I can’t remember the last time I went out to a restaurant and didn’t see at least one or two phones out per table. Parents and kids sit in the same family room, each tapping away in their own worlds.

Internet users’ biggest social challenge is that we’re Internet users. We came. We saw. We checked-in. We Tweeted. We Facebooked. We Podcasted. We Instagrammed. We left. And we went home and got online.

The web is great at closing the geographic gap between people in different regions. But it’s also great at separating people who are standing right next to each other.

And I’m not pointing fingers here. I can last through about four seconds of silence before I check my email and Twitter. I open my phone apps everywhere: in cars, in lines, when I’m with my son waiting for his school bus, at dinner parties, while watching TV with my family, and yes, while I am socially engaged with a civic-minded group. At times when it’s just too inappropriate to get online, I long for that glorious moment when a person in my proximity asks, “Hey, can someone look that up?”

When I hear those words, I pull my phone out of its holster with the pace of a gunfighter whose life is on the line. I’m the Cupertino Kid.

And then I’m there, at my civic-minded social event. But I’m also gone.

As a kid at my local county fair, I used to ride a roller coaster that rumbled around a circular track as songs like Foreigner’s Urgent blasted through a set of giant speakers. Every few times around the track, the guy running the ride would pause the music long enough to bellow out one loud question:

Do you wanna go faster?

It didn’t really matter how you answered. The ride got faster. I could hear that roller coaster guy’s voice echoing in my head in the minutes following the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.

I happened to be online as the story broke. I felt an urgent need for data. I opened about six tabs in my browser and started to hit the refresh button. Most news outlets had a breaking news alert about the shooting, but little else. I searched Twitter to increase the pace of the incoming data. Much of the data was repetitive, but it came in fast.

Within minutes, the tweets shifted from what happened to a deeper analysis of what it means. There were links to Sarah Palin’s website and attacks on what some consider to be the increasing volume of politically-motivated hate speech. Seconds later, those tweets were rebutted by others. The crime scene had barely been roped-off and already, much of the news gathering had been eclipsed by the news analysis.

Do you wanna go faster?

I did. I left my Twitter search window open as I returned to refreshing web pages. Give me something new. I need, I need. Boom. NPR reports that Giffords is dead. That news swept through the Twitterverse and on the Facebook page I now had open. I headed over the New York Times homepage. Nothing new. It still featured a stale blurb about conflicting reports on Giffords’ health. Below to the blurb, I saw the phrase: Updated 4 minutes ago.

I refreshed a few more times and wondered to myself, “What have these people been wasting their time on for the last four minutes? Where is the news?”

Do you wanna go faster?

NPR did. But as it turned out, Giffords was not dead. She was in surgery. The false news of her death spread so quickly that it made it all the way to her family members who sat in the hospital waiting room. They had to confirm with doctors that Giffords was still alive.

The story moved so fast that it passed the reality.

So did the analysis and the thousands of Tweets by those who were certain about the larger context of what the events on the ground meant long before they had even a handful of details.

I thought about tweeting a condolence. I could possibly chime in on the debate regarding hate speech and Sarah Palin’s role in all of this. Or maybe I’d offer a contrarian view about the pace at which each of us seems to achieve a level of certainty on any given topic. I’ve got to tweet something, right? This is what we do. Read, react, repeat. Sure, I had only known who Gabrielle Giffords was for about twenty minutes, but why should having no background on a topic and knowing almost none of the details about an event prevent me from serving up a concrete viewpoint?

It took everything I had not to Tweet.

Do you wanna go faster?

You can bet NPR wishes they hadn’t gone that fast.

Already all of us at NPR News have been reminded of the challenges and professional responsibilities of reporting on fast-breaking news at a time and in an environment where information and misinformation move at light speed.

Even though NPR is not a brand I necessarily associate with fast-breaking news, I can understand any editor feeling an increased demand to get new material up right away.

But what about me? When did I turn into a human breaking-news outlet who has to keep up with the second-by-second details of a story and then add my own updates and analysis to the realtime mix? How can thousands of my fellow human news machines have served up 140 character analyses before law enforcement officials on the ground even had a chance to put together a preliminary outline of what exactly happened?

Are you really sure you wanna go faster?

Just like that old county fair roller coaster, it probably doesn’t matter what you answer. The speed is increasing. The pressure to keep up and immediately chime in will only grow more urgent. The challenge to maintain a reasonable level of factual accuracy will grow more daunting. And actually taking the time to gather and reflect on information before adding an opinion to the discussion will require more restraint.

But maybe I’m too late with this message. The whole story is old news by now.

I think about a lot of things before I share online. But here’s one thing I never think about:

The unthinkable.

Daniel Miller didn’t think of that either. So he shared photos on Facebook and Flickr, wrote anecdotes in his blog, and managed his finances using Mint. And then his one year-old daughter died.

And the machine wouldn’t turn off. Every now and then he just wanted to take his mind off his grief and focus on something happier. But he was constantly reminded of his daughter by the sites and tools that were so integrated into his connected life.

Daniel explains what he calls the “infinitely connected triggers of her memory and the dumb machines” in a blog he writes to share experiences related to his family’s loss.

Someday I want to be able to sit and look at her pictures, even watch the videos, and remember how great it was when she was here. For now, accidentally seeing a thumbnail image in a directory on my computer or on my phone or on Flickr or on Facebook is enough to spawn an hours-long cycle of anxiety and depression.

… It actually goes out of its way to confront me with my pain. Facebook wants to show me memories in the sidebar. Mint tracks a college fund that –- until I worked up the energy to change it — bared her name … Now Mint sends alerts to my phone informing me that I have High Spending in Doctor & Health.

Daniel can’t escape his own digital trail. Yet he returns to the internet to add to it. He is using the machine to express his frustration that the machine won’t leave him alone. The same technology that haunts him also provides a way to mourn and remember.

I was disturbed when I first came across Daniel’s blog. This topic seemed too big and too serious for the social web. Should this be shared? Does it benefit anyone to make it public?

On one hand, it represents everything that concerns me when it comes to technology’s increasing role in our lives. Maybe we’re porting too much of our lives to public online spaces at the expense of real life, personal interactions. On the other hand, I have a couple of friends who have suffered a similar tragedy and I’m confident they will get something out of reading Daniel’s writings.

Ultimately, this is where we live now. If the internet is where we experience life, it’s inevitable that it’s where we’ll experience death as well. If you’re a young parent who just lost a kid, where else are you going to go?

Like it or not, this is home.

But if an increasing portion of our lives is now experienced or shared on the internet, then we need to take a hard look at the ramifications of living in this new world. The acts of communication, sharing and remembering online are similar to their counterparts in our offline lives, but they’re not the same. And technological advances have wildly outpaced our ability to adapt to life online.

The period during which the internet has become a centerpiece of our lives is relatively short, and during that time, we’ve been more distracted and living more urgently than ever. We haven’t had a chance to reflect on the role this technology is playing in our lives. We’ve jumped headfirst into the machine without preparing for the potential outcomes of that decision.

Take it from Daniel Miller:

As discourteous as people can be, the machines are worse, they are just too dumb to understand. In a previous age the machines didn’t talk. Now they chatter on like children unaware of their words.