Posts from — August 2012

I have a recurring dream where I am surprised with an amazing trip and when we get to the airport, I ask Josh if he packed my camera and he says no, shuttling me through security.  In my dream, I start to feel panicked over the idea of going to this place I’ve always wanted to see (usually India, Nepal, or Australia) without my camera.  So I start stalling, making excuses for why we need to go back home, take a later flight, and I am being pushed forward onto the plane without my camera.  Instead of being excited for the trip, I am miserable of the idea of traveling without any ability to record what I’m seeing; no journal, no pen, no camera.

There are people who process their trip in the moment, soaking it all in.  And there are those of us who need to regurgitate our trip and process it a second time to really take it in.  Chew the experiential cud.  This is true both for physical travel as well as emotional travel.  I need to relive moments or access memories via photographs or blog posts or journal entries down the line, or I don’t feel like I’ve really soaked in the experience.  I envy people who can process everything in the moment; but I also know my limitations.  I am someone who needs to record and reflect later in order to really know how I felt about an experience; to understand every thought that flitted through my mind at the moment which was incomprehensible upon first glance and makes complete sense when I look at it a second time down the road.  I always have a notebook on me, a pen and a camera in my purse.  While I could leave my phone at home and be okay, I wouldn’t be able to function away from home without an ability to record things.

Which is why I don’t think I would read a blog that I knew before I started reading was ephemeral in nature.  Or, maybe I would read it, but I would always hold that blog at arm’s length.  I know intellectually that every blog I read has the chance of disappearing tomorrow, but chance is different from certainty.  So I am willing to invest myself in a blog that most likely will be here tomorrow, and if it’s not, I understand too.  I’m disappointed in the same way I’m disappointed when a friend moves away or a favourite business closes down.  But I understand that shit happens, people move, restaurants close, and blogs are deleted.

I am someone who reads a posts.  Then returns to a post.  Then thinks some more about that post.  Then sometimes writes about that posts or highlights it in the Roundup.  Sometimes a thought will strike me years down the road, and I will return to that blog post and read it AGAIN.  Process it again, now with this new thought in place.  I don’t know if I would want to read a blog that I knew without a doubt would be gone down the road.  If it disappears because shit happens, I’m fine with the fact I invested the time.  But I don’t know if I would go into reading that blog knowing that it doesn’t jive with who I am as a processor, that someone may take it away from me before I’m done processing.

And perhaps you can now understand why Twitter doesn’t grab me, and why Facebook grabs me only slightly more than Twitter.  Because both of those mediums are ephemeral, fleeting.  If I don’t look at them in the moment, I miss it.  It’s too hard to search back through Facebook, and Twitter is gone semi-instantaneously if you follow enough people.  I can’t suck the marrow out of anything thought-provoking that quickly, and my time is so limited that if I’m going to read something, I want to suck the marrow out of it.  Which is why I prefer the pace of blogs.  I can read them, return to them, reflect on them, see all the comments that other people have said.  And now you may also understand why I sometimes leave comments days or weeks after the fact; many times, I was literally thinking on-and-off as well as rereading, chewing that intellectual cud.

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While I’ve never made an explicit promise to you that my blog will always be here, I feel a sense of responsibility to (1) always keep it around and (2) write a note of explanation if I ever stop posting here.  No one pressures me to do this; I just feel as if I owe it to everyone who has left their thoughts here.

There are 3000 good reasons to delete a blog, and people have outlined a few of them in the comment section on that post.  If a blog space holds bad memories for you, or holds good memories that are too painful to access, it makes complete sense to release that space, let it go, erase it.  People delete blogs because they regret what they wrote about someone else, or regret that they shared too much of themselves, or feel unsafe online.  People delete because they don’t want to pay for the upkeep of a paid site nor have the interest in moving their words back to an unpaid site just to have the archives somewhere online.  I could keep listing very good reasons for deleting a blog, and in all of those cases, I don’t believe it’s a broken promise.  A broken social contract, perhaps, but your happiness and well-being needs to factor into that social contract as well.  I miss you when you delete your blog (or stop writing but leave up the archives), but understand and support you on that decision.  And it’s true — so many people have left behind their blogs, but we still remain in contact via Facebook or Twitter or email.

I thought the ChickieNob’s thought was interesting but also was such a black-and-white way (not to mention an eight-year-old’s way) of seeing the Internet.  So many people fall into that grey area, where I think deleting the blog makes more sense than keeping it around.  In the same way that there are items that we keep lying around the house even though we no longer need them or use them, and other things that I’ve needed the catharsis of burning, breaking, trashing.

As I said, this plug-in culls out all the broken blog links and delivers them to me in a succinct list for me to do with as I please.  I can hit “ignore” and keep the person in place, knowing full well that the link goes nowhere.  Or I can unlink them, leaving the text in place, or unlink them and remove the text as well, erasing any sign that the person has been there.

For my regular blog posts, I opted to unlink the text but leave the blog name in place (for instance, in the Friday Blog Roundup).  On the blogroll, I opted to remove the link and the text, erasing the person’s existence.  I did this because I could see it becoming more annoying than helpful to have a bunch of random unlinked blog names on the list, even though erasing them felt wrong too, as if I was saying, “you were never here.”

Seeing the broken links and deleted blogs was like walking back through a ghost town.  It felt like the beginning of Oryx and Crake when Snowman is describing this empty world.  There were people I had forgotten about until I saw their blog name, and others that I thought about often and knew were gone.  It’s the natural progression of this disposable online world.  I used to take photographs carefully, making sure I used my film wisely.  Now I snap pictures with abandon; I can delete them if they don’t turn out well and it’s just random bytes disappearing.  I used to be careful in writing letters knowing that everything I sent required a stamp, a trip to the post office.  Now I send off hundreds of emails a day; some completely unnecessary, communication that would have never happened if it cost 45 cents and a car ride.

We create blogs on free blogging sites and we abandon or delete them when we no longer need them, maybe saving a copy on our hard drive, or maybe just tossing away the words like a used napkin.  I’m not applying any judgment to this; it’s just the way we operate now.

The ChickieNob saw me deleting blogs at one point, and at bedtime, she asked me what I had been doing.

“Oh, people write their blog for a while and ask me to link to it from the blogroll.  And then they delete their blog, and I have to go in and delete it on my end too when the link no longer works.”

“Deleting your blog is like going back on a promise,” the ChickieNob told me.

“How so?  No one made any promise when they asked me to add them,” I tell her.

“They made a promise to the people who read them,” she intoned, my know-it-all about social media.  “People read their story and thought they’d be around forever and then they’re gone.”*

The reality falls somewhere much more grey than the black-and-white proclamations of the ChickieNob.  Promises can’t be implied; they have too much weight for people to assume a promise.  But at the same time, there is a truth in the idea that we start relationships believing they will always be there.  If we knew at the start that the relationship would end in the future, would we enter into the friendship?  And if we knew a blog would be deleted once we were attached to it, would we start reading it in the first place?

I can’t agree with her, and for the record, I have no problem with people deleting their blog.  It’s your space to do with as you will, though I’m glad I now have this plug-in because what I think people don’t realize is that every time they delete their blog, they affect every site where they commented or where the person linked to them.

I did feel a strange tinge of sadness seeing all those blogs that once meant a lot to me disappear into the ether.  You can still feel sad even if you completely understand; even if you support the decision to leave a blog behind.

Would you start reading a blog if you knew definitively that at some point it would end and be deleted?**

* The ChickieNob is, indeed, smarter, faster, and smaller.  She will be able to survive on her wits alone when the zombies come.

** Of course all blogs, all relationships, all friendships end at some point.  But there is a difference between knowing that intellectually and having an expiration date in hand.

If you have noticed that the blogroll is currently free of spam or broken links, you can thank Lori who told me about my shiny new plug-in that culls out all the broken links.  It combed through all 3000+ on the blogroll and told me which ones were password-protected (no point in having them on the regular blogroll section since people can’t click over to read), deleted, or now led to spam sites since they had been abandoned.  It also went through the other 20,000+ links on my blog and culled out all the dead ones, so links have been deleted all over the place though the text remains (except for the blogroll — I went through and deleted those unlinked to blogs).

Of course this doesn’t mean that every blog is in the correct category — there are still a bunch that are out of place — nor does it mean that I’ve taken down blogs that have stopped posting since I think there is a lot of worth in the archives.  But at least everything you’re going to click on is going to take you to a blog.

My only fear is that in the deleting frenzy that legitimate links or temporarily problematic links were removed.  So if you want to check to make sure you’re still on it, use the search engine on the left sidebar of my blog.  Put the name of your blog inside quotation marks so it only searches for times that your entire blog title comes up vs. every time the words appear on their own.  It should pull up your room on the blogroll.  Please make sure that if you ever changed the name of your blog that you search under all its past incarnations since it may still be there except under a different name.

The plug-in will continue to let me know when blogs have been deleted so the blogroll should stay relatively neat.  Now I just need to shift people around.

Tigger wrote a great comment the other day on the Boys Wearing Dresses post where she asks: “I want to teach my son tolerance, and yet you shouldn’t tolerate intolerance… and doesn’t that then make you intolerant?”  It reminded me of when we explained to the twins why we weren’t going to the Elvis Costello concert nor purchasing his music anymore, even though he was one of my favourite musicians.  We were still going to listen to his old stuff, but we weren’t going to invest money in his career anymore due to his stance on BDS.

“So we are boycotting Elvis Costello because you don’t support his boycott?” the ChickieNob asked.

To be fair, there is a big difference between boycotting an individual and boycotting a country.  In one case, the individual has control over his or her actions, and in the other, the citizens can’t necessarily control the actions of their government.  And it’s the citizens who are harmed by a country boycott — people who don’t have the means to make the change.  But the idea of boycotting someone for boycotting makes about as much sense as being intolerant of intolerance.

[And amusingly, A had her own version of this in a comment on the Maeve Binchy post where she mused on the idea of cutting down women who cut down women.]

So should we be intolerant of intolerance?

Or does that make us just as bad as the intolerant?

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I have to admit that I have a problem with the concept of tolerance, especially when it is applied to a group of people.  It’s probably similar to how I feel about individual boycotts vs. group boycotts.  Or why I have a problem with banning groups of people vs. banning behaviours.

I have no problem that I can’t call out curse words at the ballpark — they’ve banned the behaviour, and it’s their park, their rules.  It is clear why I can’t call out curse words, and how this behaviour might impede on the enjoyment of the game for the people around me.  I have a big problem with banning children from public spaces because it isn’t clear why they are being banned.  Not all children are disruptive, whereas there is no way to utilize the word “fuck” and make it playable over public radio.  So non-disruptive children are lumped in with disruptive children, and we have intolerance rear its head; applied to everyone within a certain group.

I am always puzzled when people use arguments such as “I paid X amount to go to X, and I don’t want to be disturbed.”  Which makes it sound as if there is anyone out there who wants their evening encroached on by another individual.  There!  That is where I place my intolerance: individuals who encroach on my evening whether they are children or adults or elderly ladies.  No one wants their evening ruined, and people are certainly entitled to be able to enjoy a movie without cell phones going off, curse words being shouted, or children tantruming.  If any of those things occur, I’m all for that person being escorted out of the theater.

If you want to run a public space (whether that public space is a restaurant, movie theater, or blog), you need to be responsible and put on your big girl panties and run the space.  Which means having uncomfortable interactions with users from time-to-time as you deal with each person on a case-by-case basis.  Even if children are banned, it doesn’t mean employees can relax on the job.  They still need to escort out drunk people who vomit in the restaurant (yes, I’ve seen this before).  Or talk to customers about turning off their cell phone.  Or calling the police if a theater goer becomes belligerent.  Running a public space should be a positive experience, but even positive experiences come with drawbacks from time to time, and if you’re the person in charge, you have to deal with those awkward, uncomfortable moments.

Unless we’re going to ban all people who might possibly commit an inappropriate behaviour for the space, I can’t stand by and support the banning of one group of individuals.  Banning individuals before they’ve ever gotten a chance to prove which side of the encroachment line they fall feels prejudice.  Intolerance.

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On the flip side, I don’t really understand the idea of tolerating a group of people.  Tolerating is one step above throwing up in your mouth.  There is no group of people — especially one comprised of individuals I don’t know — that I tolerate.  I don’t endure groups, I endure individuals.  Annoying, obnoxious individuals.  Tolerance is a word I apply to those individuals I must spend time with and really rather I didn’t.  And I find it strange to apply that term to a whole group of people.  How do I even know that they’d be unpleasant to spend time around?  Maybe they’d be great fun if I gave them a chance.

The Olympic games are fresh in my mind, especially the Opening Ceremony when all the athletes filed past, waving their country’s flag.  Pretty much every single group looked around the stadium in absolute wonder, just thrilled to have made it to the Olympics.  How can you see that collective response to reaching the games and still believe that we need to solely tolerate one another on a racial, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, age (or take your pick of your favourite divisive trait) level.  Do I believe there were assholes amongst the athletes, the sort I’d need to tolerate if I had to sit next to them at dinner?  Absolutely.  I think there were plenty of people in that wave of athletes who’d be absolutely dreadful to spend time with, and if I did end up next to them for the evening, I’d have to tolerate them.  But could I apply that thought to an entire team of people?  A region of teams?  A continent-worth of teams?  That’s where I think the idea of tolerance of groups becomes dangerous; when we believe that we know all we can know about a set of individuals based on a single shared characteristic.

So I don’t tolerate anyone based on their race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, age: I only tolerate people based on how much they’re an asshole.  And can some kids be assholes?  Absolutely.  But so can some adults.  Which is why I give you all a chance.  Until you show me a reason not to give you a chance.

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And yet, having said all of the above, I am a firm believer in teaching tolerance.  Meaning; teaching that you need to sit next to people who annoy you, work with people who piss you off, and get along with the whole of society.  That it’s fine to have problems with individuals, but you should stick around and try to work it out — tolerate one another — instead of cutting yourself off from the offending person.

In this world of unfriending someone with the click of the button, I think it would behoove children (and adults) to also learn that skill of tolerance, of being with people who annoy the crap out of you and enduring them the whole time you need to be together.  You don’t need to love them; you don’t even need to like them, but you do sometimes need to suck it up and tolerate an individual, even if they don’t really deserve your tolerance.

Why?

Because humans live in the face-to-face world (and online) in communities.  And the flip side of never learning tolerance, in choosing instead to make your world smaller and smaller by cutting people out of your life who feel intolerable is that you end up with a very small circle of support.   There is a difference between toxic people who detract enormously from your life, and people who are just annoying.  And one deserves to be treated with intolerance.  And the other group, that latter group, you have to tolerate them.  For tolerance sake.

Let’s pretend we live in a dystopian society on the brink of a zombie apocalypse, and the only army you can amass to fight 12,000,000 of the undead are the active Twitter followers of Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself), Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome), or Justin Bieber (@justinbieber).

Neil Gaiman, by the way, has 1,753,633 followers.  Stephen Colbert has 3,796,206.  And Justin Bieber is pulling in 26,614,116.

You’d get a scorching case of Bieber fever and go with the teen heartthrob, outnumbering the zombies 2:1, right?  But not so fast.  If you want to survive the zombie apocalypse, you’re going to have to pay attention to the small details.  Notice I said active followers — let’s take a look at how many of those followers are actual human beings who log into Twitter regularly.

According to StatusPeople, only 41% of Gaiman’s followers are active Twitter users.  15% of those 1,753,633 followers are robots and another 44% of the followers are inactive.  Colbert has an equal percentage of actual users — 41% — though his robots (28%) and inactive (31%) break down differently.  Lastly, Bieber clocks in with a lower 36% actual users (with 31% robots and 33% inactive).  Making that 26,614,116 closer to 9,581,081.  Still an impressive number.  But if you had to fight 12,000,000 zombies and thought you’d have an enormous advantage with Bieber’s original follower number, you’d be sorely mistaken.  In fact, you are outnumbered and the zombies are most definitely eating your brain.

Brains!

You may be wondering how I’d fare when the zombies come.  Out of my 2,775 Twitter followers, 89% (or 2,470) are active users.  Which means I have a decent fight machine in my back pocket.  Other than amassing this zombie army, that number is fairly meaningless.  It doesn’t tell you how many of those 2,470 actually give a shit and would chop off a zombie’s head if it were eating me.  How many of those 2,470 would give me their opinion on what to buy at the hardware store if I was zombie-proofing my home.  How many of those 2,470 would cry with me if the zombies got to Cozy Jackson. (Do zombies eat hamsters?)

By which I mean, I’m not going to put too much stock in numbers.  I’m not going to put much stock in my number or your number of Bieber’s number.  Because they’re all just numbers.  And they can’t keep you safe when the zombies come.