social media

I’ve just quickly created a page of books that have influenced me. In fact, while it’s page name is “Books” the secondary headline is Books that have influenced me.

It’s a short list — just five. I think of all of them as related to writing though only one is specifically about writing. Most are web/social media related. But I see their messages as applicable to writing.

And a couple may strike you as peculiar. You may ask, “What the hell has that to do with social media?” or something similar. You may think they are old and no longer relevant.

As mentioned, I threw it together quickly and I hope to explain soon what it is about each of them that I think is important. If the stars are properly aligned and I can write well, you’ll understand what it is about each I find of value and why I’ve picked them.

You can see the list here.

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I began thinking today about social media and all the tools we see. There is something of a digital cornucopia of “stuff”: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Twitter apps, aggregators and on and on. New ones pop up everyday.

Accompanying all of these is the hype. There is the marketing from the companies that bring them out, the reviews from the various “spheres” and the conversations we carry on about them, online and off. “You can do this with it.” “You can do that.” “You can also do these things too.”

It all sounds marvelous unless you are hearing from the contrarian perspective in which case the tools and apps are frivolous or any number of other negative descriptives.

What I was wondering about, however, was how we actually use them. Are we using them just because everyone else is and they are the distraction of the month? Are we using them to a productive end? How are we using them … or more to the point, I suppose, why? What, if anything, do we get from them?

I’m also thinking less about the business aspect and more about the general population that uses them. There are a number of ways we use them as far as business goes, some effective, some not so much. But how and why do people use them, that big consumer base that gets talked about so much? I’m sure there are a number of answers to this but I also wonder if they all don’t dovetail into one or two general answers, a theme that shows how those different hows and whys all relate.

Despite all the things that can be done with social media tools, from sending messages to playing games and grabbing weather information quickly, I think all the whys can be summed into a single word: people.

There are supportive words that follow from that one word: connection, communication and information.

Regardless of all the flim flam with video, audio, Flash and games, for people to find the Internet (and social media) to be of any relevance for them, those four words need to be considered essential: people, connection, communication and information.

Even a silly video involves those words since it is pointless without connection to other people which, when that occurs, communicates and even passes along information, at least to the extent that it says something about you. (Just as it says something about those who respond to it.)

Everything else, while amusing and entertaining, is just a passing fancy. In the world of social media, I suspect that if you don’t keep those four words paramount in your mind you run the risk of becoming quickly forgettable.

***

I should add that I don’t think I’m saying anything new here or something I haven’t either said or alluded to before. I’m probably repeating myself with this post. But repetition is not a bad thing since it is often through repetition that we best remember.

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I’ve been looking at a few sites offering web design and related services and I find myself puzzled, even a bit alarmed. This is not due to what I found (though in some cases it was) but by what I did not find.

I have seen absolutely no reference to content. Do the sites magically populate themselves? If not, who does it? If the client does, is there no consultative service to advise them on what and how to put the content in or maintaining it? If the client doesn’t handle the content, who does? If the web design company does, who handles the research, the writing, the editing? Have they a background in it? Are they good?

There were no references to social media other than “Follow us on Twitter” and/or something similar for Facebook. If a company is moving to or revamping an online presence, isn’t this a crucial aspect? Where do they get help, direction or advice on this?

I found a few web design/web services companies with URLs that required the www preface. Personally, I never use it anymore. I just type in something like writelife.net. No http. No www. I suspect many people are like me. If so, there are a lot of people going to a “page not found” message when they type in the web company’s address. I can’t believe that builds a lot of confidence in a web design company’s awareness of how the web works.

I also found quite a few companies using dated language. In the world of business, marketing and technology, terminology changes almost daily and if you rely on today’s clichés you become tomorrow’s anachronism. Surely “offering solutions” is at least ten years old. I believe current terminology should be avoided at all costs but I do realize it is often unavoidable. But this puts the onus on you to continually assess your site and see where and how it requires revamping. In the online world, static means death.

None of the above is true of all web design sites. Hopefully, I just stumbled on a few that skewed my perception. It is worrying though. On the other hand, from my perspective, maybe it holds the promise of some work. :-)

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I’ve been going through my posts from 2009 trying to identify the ones I think are the better ones. I suppose was making a kind of Top Ten list, despite my recurring griping about lists. It is not a “best of” list, however. It is a list of the ones I liked, though some may not have been all they could or should have been. It’s a favourites list, I suppose. It goes like this:

1. What Star Trek did to me
2. The class system is alive and well and now online
3. Readers have responsibilities too
4. I wonder what she’ll say today
5. Generations, transitions, moving pictures
6. Literacy is a prerequisite for independence
7. Monetizing meaning: what is content anyway?
8. Is usability kaput?
9. Who are we not hearing from?
10. The first draft is the outline

It has been an intriguing exercise. As I go through the posts I see the themes that have preoccupied me. I’ve been aware that there was some redundancy to my posts as I keep returning to certain subjects but I think this is likely true of anyone with a blog.

Here are some of the themes, observations and comments I see popping up over and over:

• What I perceive as a belief among many that social media, and the Internet generally, is ubiquitous and of a democratic nature and how that is a false belief.
• Sometimes the act of communication is more important than what is communicated.
• Social media is not tactile. We’re all in touch with each other online but we never touch each other – there is no physical contact to technological connections.

Those are the three big ones I keep seeing myself writing about. As far as the topic of writing went, my focus was a bit generic. I seemed to write more about that vague thing we call content – what is happening to traditional news, how blogs have evolved, managing social media content and so on. I was all over the map which is not unusual for me.

As an aside … I rarely make lists like the one above. I decided to do so this time as a first step in a process of going through all my posts, back to 2004, and identifying the better material. In my inept fashion, I’m trying to do a bit of online housekeeping.

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Through social media I’ve been following a couple of issues recently. It has lead me to have questions about social media, particularly the conversation aspect. A news story, a blog post or a Facebook page has comment tools or “like” tools and the original item acts as an initiator to a conversation.

I’ve noticed a few things in the ones I’ve been following and it’s possible the nature of the topics has influenced the character of the discussions, but here they are:

The emotional quality of the comments have not been reflected in the real world. While the pro/con aspects seen online (most in favour or most against) may be reflected there, the emphatic nature of the opinions is not. In fact, what has appeared online as something people were raging about was reflected in the real world as calmness and sometimes indifference.

I’ve also seen the negative appear to be much more engaging than the positive. In other words, there appears to be a desire to vent against something, more so than a desire to promote or cheer something. In one case in particular, a Facebook page was created to support something and gained many followers – people who were giving their support. However, though doing this, for the most part they were venting against the reasons for the need of support.

In many ways, it reminded me of talk radio. Having worked in radio, including talk radio, I know that giving people a chance to be against something, to vent, gets listeners much more quickly engaged than the opposite. That’s why there are so many talk radio shows that sound like angry cranks run them: that’s where the audience is, it’s where the money lies.

One of my questions then is this: does what we see via social media reflect how people actually think and feel?

Other questions: If it does reflect how people think and feel, does it do so in a way that distorts it? To what extent can we give it credence? And why are people so eager to rant and less eager to voice what they like? Is that question even valid?

I noticed something else about Facebook pages that I think leads to distortion. A page had been set up to “Say No!” to a particular issue. It grew as such things tend to do. Looking at the wall comments, people were angry and venting and making various statements.

Here is my problem: Seeing the comments, I occasionally wanted to comment, such as saying a fact wasn’t accurate or an argument was illegitimate. I couldn’t do so without joining the page which would add me to their numbers and suggest I supported the position when the opposite was true. So there was little or no debate on this page – it was people telling one another things they wanted to hear.

To some degree, this is a Facebook problem due to wording and how pages are set up but it is more our problem due to how we choose to see and interpret such things. And that leads me back to the questions I have about the legitimacy of what we see as social media conversations.

Is social media simply a handy tool for cathartic venting? Or is there some value to what we see? If so, how do we determine how valuable it is, to what extent does it really reflect the opinions of people and, perhaps more importantly, the emotional commitment we have for issues, artists, products and on and on?

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(This was originally posted October 23rd, 2005 on another one of my blogs, one that is on hiatus. I’ve edited slightly to make the terminology more current.)

I came across a post about blogging and social media and know exactly what it’s talking about when the blogger asks, “Why do some write about every, little, single, humdrum, minute aspect of the everyday?” It can be annoying and irksome at the best of times. I feel like she does. On the other hand, I do the very thing that bugs me.

It got me thinking about blogging again and, surprisingly, I came across a song by Emmylou Harris that I think of now as the social media song. It’s called Can You Hear Me Now?

And I’m reminded of two quotes. The first is Eduardo Galeano in his Book of Embraces. I’ve lost the exact wording, but it was along the lines of, “Everyone has a voice, something to say that needs to be heard by the others.” (I’ve pretty much butchered it, but that’s roughly what he said.)

The other quote is possibly from Martin Luther King, though I may be wrong. But it goes something like, “Violence is the speech of those who have no voice.”

And my point with both of these is the business of a voice. Technology aside, social media and most things on the Internet are about communication and communication is about people and voices and having someone on this silly rock just listen to you.

I send out my S.O.S.
A message in a bottle set out to sea
It just reads “Soul in distress”
And nobody ever got back to me

Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?

Not that everyone online is in distress. Most aren’t. But the point is people need to chatter and they need to feel someone, anyone, is listening to them chatter. I’ve always thought this was one of the biggest mistakes people make in relationships – not understanding that part of your job when you’re in one is to be a sounding board.

And sometimes not understanding that you really only need to appear to be listening because, often, when people sound off they don’t necessarily want a discussion. Shit builds up during the day and they need to let it go, like steam. Part of the art of listening is knowing when you’re supposed to listen and interact and when you’re really just supposed to sit there and nod.

I guess my point is that people need an outlet and this is one of the things social media provides – outlets. But people also need a sense that there is someone listening, even if what they are saying is nothing worth saying. The act of communication is often more important than the content of the communication. And this is why we see things online like – I changed my pants, I brushed my teeth, I petted the dog and so on.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

People are looking for an ear.

Not long ago, I came across one of the saddest blogs I’ve encountered. It was from a year or two ago, a woman in Toronto, and it was a blog with single post. Her husband of a certain number of years had been having an affair she had been unaware of. Now he had left saying he not only didn’t love her, he never had and now he had finally found someone he did love. She was blind-sided and alone and … well, you know the story.

One post. Who do you talk to when the house is empty, you’re alone and this is what you’re dealing with?

How did the load get to be so heavy?
I used to wear my trouble like a crown
A bad flood’s pounding on the levee
And I’m gonna need some help to hold my ground.

Anyway … blogs aren’t all sad – the exact opposite. I read a lot of blogs because they’re so damn funny.

But I think I mainly read them because I find people who feel about things the way I do – and sometimes very trivial things. But you get a sense that you’re not alone. You realize how freakin’ big the world is, how many people are out there, and that someone, somewhere is listening.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

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I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. So here goes:

1 - No one cares about your brand.

2 – Given number 1, you need to find something people do care about.

3 - No one cares about your company.

4 - Given number 3, you need to represent your company with a human face which means a style, an interest, a tone and hopefully a name – Bob, Mary, Fred, Susan – along with a last name and, somewhere, what their relationship to your company is (CEO, VP Marketing, janitor, whatever).

5 - Don’t post on Twitter, Facebook or your blog too frequently. And don’t post too infrequently. How do you tell? Have people in your company following you and get their opinions. Better yet, ask the people who are following your Twitter feed, Facebook feed, blog feed. People like being asked their opinion. It gives them a sense of involvement.

6 - It’s not only okay to discuss things in your feeds that are unrelated to your company, products and services, it’s probably a good idea. See numbers 1 and 3.

7 - If you are only posting you are wasting your time.

8 - Given number 7, get off your butt and start following and commenting and forwarding other feeds.

9 - Using social media is cheap only if you consider it in dollar terms.

10 - The cost of social media is time. See numbers 5, 6 and 8.

11 - Some social media campaigns have worked (I’ve heard) but these are usually clever, gimmicky campaigns.

12 - The problem with number 11 is that they wear thin fast and, without something substantive behind them, they die (as do you) on the vine.

13 - Do not trust anyone describing him or herself as a social media expert.

14 - There are no social media experts (see number 13). Everyone is making it up as they go along.

15 - Pontificating grandly is the favourite social media pastime. This post is a very good example.

And there they are. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

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I’ve recently started a project that requires a certain amount of reclamation work. By that I mean my memory is pretty awful so I’m doing some work to reclaim my memory by going through my various blog archives. It’s been something of a revelation.

I have three blogs: this one, another devoted to movies and a personal blog that is currently on an extended hiatus as I decide what to do with it. Writelife (ostensibly about writing, social media and so on) and the movie blog both have a specific focus (and sometimes not so specific). To some degree, they are self-censored in that career-related people, companies and whoever else can see them and I don’t want to come across as too much of a raving blog lunatic. (I’m not always successful in that regard.)

The third, the personal one, is pretty much me uncensored. In fact, it’s on hiatus right now as I consider the wisdom of this, consider the wisdom of trying to manage three blogs and I try to figure out what to do with the blog name, which is a stupid one I dreamed up at the spur of the moment a few years ago. But all that’s an aside …

Here’s the thing: Of the three, the most interesting is hands-down the personal one. It is the one where, when I’m on my game, I have the best writing. It’s easily the funniest. And when I use the word “censor” in connection with it I’m not suggesting there is anything that needs censoring. I use the f-word more frequently there, in the older posts, more so than I would now. But other than that, it’s largely tame stuff. The censor business was simply considering how I appeared to others online, at least in the first impressions sense. From a career perspective, was it a good idea?

Going through the archives (and those of the other blogs) I see certain themes recurring. (That is my diplomatic way of saying I’m repetitive.) And I see that there is one thing in particular I’m interested in above anything else: people.

Why is the personal one more interesting than the other two? Because it is specifically about people: me as a people (obviously) and others as people. That’s also why it’s funny, at least to me.

The other two blogs come at the subject of people sideways. Here, on this blog, by discussing marketing, social media, marketing, communication and so on. On the other blog, via movies which, when they are good movies, are always good because they are good stories and good stories are always about people.

I found it interesting that among the posts in the personal blog archive there were a few that sounded very similar to recent ones posted here. The critiques of social media today are very similar to the critiques of blogs from several years ago, prior to the proliferation of social media tools and when personal blogs were either at their height or beginning to fall from that height.

What is most interesting to me, however, is the writing (to me) is so much better. I don’t think it relates to the writing as writing but to what the writing was about and how it went about it. Posts about events and topics that, on the surface, were utterly trivial, were actually the most engaging.

So once again, as often happens for me, I’m rethinking what I rethought a while ago.

As for the project I referred to above, my fingers are crossed that I have the tenacity to complete it. That is always the hardest part.

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I really am tired of the repetitive and now long-redundant either/or debate around traditional and social media. Apart from being well worn, it risks obfuscating other issues. A good example of what gets lost lies in the Michael Valpy essay, Is this the end of social cohesion? and David Eaves’ response, Dear Valpy: social media isn’t killing democracy, it’s making it stronger.

We can probably blame Mr. Valpy because he brings up the subject of newspapers and social media and certainly makes some valid points (such as quoting Carleton’s Christopher Waddell’s speculation about seeking out confirmation online rather than challenges).

The problem, however, is that if you accept the argument that newspapers provided some social cohesion and, through challenges and debate, unifying ideas (something Mr. Eaves flatly rejects), surely we can take it further. If we were all made to own and read and study Bibles, and all made to belong to and attend Christian churches and their services, regardless of whether we were Christian or not, surely we’d have the cultural coherence and common touchstones that they had in Elizabethan England. Now that was coherent and that was a world with things in common, including shared values.

The problem is that in a democratic society that can hardly be considered democratic.

We’re told, however, that social media is. It has the potential to save the day. But who exactly is social media democratic for? The homeless? Personally, I’m not aware of any homeless people online, but maybe my social circle is limited.

Canada’s aboriginal people, those living in far off, rural areas with no Internet access? Or the ones living in poverty – do they have access? Do they even have computers? (I recently approached Canada’s food banks with the idea of using social media as a way to facilitate what they did, to reach more potential donors and volunteers etc. They liked the idea but had some huge obstacles: their disparate nature and the fact that many food banks don’t have Internet access and/or don’t have computers. The real world gave me a wake up call.)

Yes, I’ve written about this before.

Here’s the thing about social media: you need a computer or some handheld device. And you need access. And even if you do have the wherewithal for those things, you need to know how to use them and have a facility for doing so. It may be hard to believe, but some people don’t. Just as some people couldn’t balance a bank account to save their lives and some people couldn’t sing on key no matter how many lessons they took.

Social media comes with predicates. It makes assumptions about who you are and what you have. You meet those, you get to use it. Otherwise, you’re outta luck pal.

So let’s be careful when we speak of the democratizing nature of social media.

Our beautiful mosaic

But getting back to Michael Valpy’s essay … Mr. Eaves says Mr. Valpy enters the conversation three years late and that is true if the conversation is this endless traditional/social media thing. But the science fiction author Samuel R. Delany was writing about this back in the 1970s and 80s. However, he wasn’t writing about social media because what is at the heart of Valpy’s essay is not tools but people and society and our ability to find and talk to each other. Social media is a tool and nothing more.

What Delany was writing about was social fragmentation and the “What if …?” that follows when you follow it through to its extremes. In one of his novels (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I believe) the risk is cultural fugue, a kind of social catatonia. The economist Herbert Simon has said, “A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.” Delany’s novel seems to suggest, “A wealth of choice leads to an inability to choose.” Fugue.

To use a Canadian cliché, if we are a cultural mosaic what are we a mosaic of? Cultures or gated communities of the mind and spirit? Mr. Eaves doesn’t like the quote by Carleton’s Christopher Waddell about us seeking reinforcement rather than challenge online but I suspect Waddell is correct. But I think that is a human tendency the Internet facilitates rather than being a consequence of it being the Internet bogeyman. And it may be we tend to do this the more fragmented our world becomes.

Whatever the truth is, there is a problem and reducing it to a traditional versus social media argument misdirects attention. It misses the real world.

We think we know Canada and Canadians but what we know is the parameters of our own lives: friends, work, family. To everything else, we are tourists. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” applies. We don’t know the rest of the country, we don’t even know the rest of our own provinces. (How many people in Vancouver have ever been to, much less lived in, Fort St. John? How many of us have lived in Smiths Falls? How many in Toronto have lived in Elliot Lake? Who has been to and lived in Bathurst, New Brunswick?)

Social media can facilitate this but only if we are listening. Waddell’s question (“Do we?”) is one worth asking along with, “Who are we listening to?” Despite all the online voices, we have to constantly ask, “Who am I not hearing from?”

You can be sure someone’s voice isn’t there.

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