This post will deal with Twitter. It will only deal with Twitter, in specifics, and yet is perfectly applicable to almost any strain of “social media.” We put “social media” in quotes because the term grates. Anyway, I’ve noticed that there seem to be quite a few misconceptions and odd thoughts relating to Twitter and I thought that I would take a bit of time to clear them up as best I could in my own little way.

Which means this is sure to offend a few people, somehow. Furthermore I won’t apologize for it. Worse yet I am sure it will manage, somehow, to offend folks that I consider friends. People will also be tempted to message me, email me, DM me on Twitter or any other way to leaving me a note to explain to me why they do not do the things I list here as an annoyance. By doing so they show me only that they think they are doing it wrong – which is a sign to change how you’re doing it.

So let me be clear up front: If you think I mean you, you know what I might mean you. But if it bothered me with you, specifically, I would’ve mentioned it to you in person or unfollowed you or something by now – so we’re good. No need to tell me. Really. Honest. No, please. Thanks.

So now, onto the actual thoughts:
Read more

Strange things, disasters. How can we be expected to cope with the sheer volume of tragedy and loss of life in a sane and rational manner? When you can turn on the news and see one more stat, one more increment of loss, how are we supposed to keep standing with the weight of that crushing us?

Of course, it is actually easier to cope if you are in the disaster. I’m not saying “Those lucky fuckers” by any stretch of the imagination, I’m just saying that when you’re in the thick of it you don’t have time or distance to stop and wonder how to cope – you just fucking survive.

For us, at a remove, it can be harder. We have all this technology at our fingertips, we can connect with anyone, we can move data and do all this stuff! And yeah, some of that can be a help in relief efforts and making a difference, but it still manages to be a problem because the amount it can help is less than the amount it can upset. Pulling all the news in, in real time, will always affect you harder than using that same technology to push hope outward, no matter how you do it – through thoughts or money or alternative uses. The raw truth is that the emotional impact of reality is harsher than the emotional soothing of doing what you can. Because you’ll always want to put the word “little” between “what” and “you can” regardless of truth. Just the way humans work, really.

So what then? How the hell do we keep moving?
Read more

Events that intersect the Internet (i.e.: Major sporting events, political events, celebrity moments, award shows, or “other”) have discreet, predictable patterns, much like the stages of grief. I thought I would chart them, with some help from the always wise Jen O.. Here’s are the stages we broke down, in their proper order:

• Mocking.
• As an event starts the first instinct of the Internet is to mock the living fuck out of it, on principle. This is normal and dandy, because who doesn’t appreciate a good mocking of any subject around?
• Fake ignorance
• Once a subject has been broached a mass of people must them claim they have never heard of the issue (or people) involved, declaring it unimportant if they don’t know about it.
• Boredom
• Reaching this stage means that the initial mockers are now done with the subject and wish everyone else would stop joining in, as, didn’t we make it clear, they’re done already, so why are you not done as well?
• Annoyance
• That boredom, above, quickly turns to raw annoyance that other people still want to talk about this, because:
• The annoyed party is done talking about it.
• They claim to not know what it is.
• They don’t care about it anyway, as they are sure they said once so why the hell do you?
• Moral superiority
• Annoyance turns to moral superiority much like anger turns to hate which turns to fear which turns to the Dark Side, ya know? Let’s be honest here, after a while there is so much annoyance that it becomes a this mass of Argh with a glaze of “I’m over this, why aren’t you, oh because I’m better / smarter / faster / stronger / the six million dollar man-er / than you.”
• Backlash
• Once enough people have reached moral superiority the tide turns and the backlash begins. Suddenly people who mock the event / person / thing are mean and should remember how it would feel to be in their shoes. Why can’t we just enjoy an event? Why must we make fun of it? And so on and so forth. Because now that these folks are so totally done they’re done for all of us and are disappointed in our behavior, to boot.
• Regret
• Thanks, guys, now we all just feel kinda bad. Not really bad, of course, but just sorta meanish. So we’ll go out and blog about it and tweet about it and make ourselves feel better as fast as possible. Which leads, very quickly (regret don’t last around here, guys) to…
• Boredom
• Are you guys still feeling sorry for yourselves? Come on!
• Annoyance
• No, really, get over it! We felt bad for a second! Christ you bunch of whiny babies, move on already! Who cares anymore? No one cares! It’s over! Whiners! Stop it!
• Moral superiority
• I mean I felt bad too but I got over it, why can’t you? It isn’t like this is that big a deal, right? I mean it doesn’t affect you personally, on a daily level, so why can’t you be more like me and brush it off and keep moving? Suckers, lord, how lame can you get, just move on. Stop it.
• Mocking
• And we’re right back where we started, the event / thing having reached a level where it is trumped by the next thing in line so that now we may all safely mock the past event without worrying, because it is not the big thing of the moment. Stasis, on the internet, is mocking. It really is.

Share with others

• Share on Tumblr

A few days ago the NY Times ran a story with the title “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter”. Of course, this being the internet – everyone ran around screaming about how “blogs are dead” now. Because if there’s one thing the NY Times knows, it’s technology and social wind drift.

…wait. What?

Let’s take a look at this for a second, because it’s been making me laugh for a few days now. First let’s look at the actual story. It goes on to say how kids these days (Those darn youts! They ruint everything! Except they didn’t at all.) are using FaceBook and Twitter “instead of blogs.”

Well, fair enough. Except… see the article manages to go in circles once it gets past “Kids think “blogs” not as good, older people like them still if not more” and even then it misses a critical point.

People “use” FaceBook mostly by posting Notes on it. Which, really, are blog entries. So people are not blogging by blogging. Righty-o! Got. So what’s this article saying?

It’s saying nothing, it just wants eyeballs on it. I mean that’s the job, there. Writing an article with a lede that grabs people and will knowingly make the internet scream is good for business. And this certainly did that. Because the number of people, obviously myself included, who wrote blog entries about how blogs ain’t dead and linked back to the article… well. There are enough to prove the point.

But let’s look at the bigger point: Younger folks are using FaceBook more than individual blogging sites. And part of that is because they feel people don’t read or comment to their personal sites, but they do if they use something like FaceBook.

Which is 100% correct. Let’s go back in time, now. People used to blog, by hand, without a CMS base. And people wouldn’t read it. Eventually LiveJournal started up and it formed a community and people blogged there and commented and folks found that if they talked there they would get a bunch of people who were tuned to their “station” so to speak, reliably.

MySpace did the same for a while. And then personal blogs took over again. And now FaceBook is pulling it back in, the same way as happened ten or eleven years ago. And it makes perfect sense.

People like to tell stories. You can’t stop that. But they like to be heard, too. And if they have to shout into the wind and hope that people remember to stop in listening range they will get frustrated, more often than not. But if you give them a channel, a network where people can easily make lists of things they want to get information from, an aggregator, then it becomes world’s easier to track stuff – and so people do.

RSS was supposed to solve this but never did. Still, it makes perfect sense that young adults (by which I define teens and those just moving past being teens) are moving closer and tighter into spaces that let them create channels to share data instead of screaming to the wind. You want your friends close. You want a community out there. LiveJournal’s biggest boom time was when most of the user base was 13-16. As they grew older the service started to wane.

FaceBook will, too, in five or ten years time. And the next generation will use something different to create their communities. And then we’ll have screaming and cloth rending parties about that, too.

But saying “Blogging is dead!” is a cheap sensationalist move that ignores the facts, the history and the reality of what’s going on. People want their own communities. Not the ones someone else built and used. Not their own spaces. They want a place to grow and share with other people that can easily drift ideas. And as they get older they’ll move off, the ones who want to keep telling stories, to their own personal spaces (Personally I blog in my own space and then syndicate it out to FaceBook and LiveJournal and an RSS feed. But that’s me and I have issues.). And a new generation will infest a new space and the cycle will continue.

People will still blog – in the sense that they will still tell stories, about themselves, about their lives and about each other. People won’t move away from that. The exact website they do it on will change, and the backbone tech will certainly change, but the fact of it never will.