Category — Blogiquette or On Blogging

If I want to know how you are doing, I go to your blog.  You may not post there anymore; you may be drawn to the quickness of Facebook or Twitter, throwing up your thoughts on various social media sites.  So, in that case, I probably don’t know how you’re doing.  I’m not being obnoxious and saying, “well, if you’re going to post on Facebook, then I’m not reading what you have to say.”  I’m just saying that Facebook controls their algorithm, and chances are, I won’t see your status update at all unless I click over to your wall.

It came out over the weekend that Facebook tweaked their algorithm to control what type of status updates you saw (if you were one of the 700,000 people studied) in order to control your emotions.  They wanted to see if they could upset you or make you happy.  And you allowed them to do this by accepting their terms of service, which implicitly state that they are allowed to study you.  So they studied you.  And they found that you could be manipulated.

I, obviously, include myself in that “you” since I am on Facebook.

As The Daily Dot reports:

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper reveals that Facebook conducted a massive experiment to determine the “emotional contagion” effect, by testing whether reducing the number of positive posts you saw on your news feed would make you less happy.

To do this, Facebook tweaked its algorithm to make sure some users saw primarily positive posts, some saw negative posts, and some saw neutral posts in their news feeds. They then waited to see whether the emotional content of the posts in users’ news feeds had any effect on what they subsequently posted.

The result? Yes, it totally does: The researchers, who were from Facebook, Cornell, and the University of California-San Francisco, all revealed that users who saw positive posts in their news feeds were more likely to post positive posts themselves, and those who saw predominantly negative posts were more likely to produce negative content.

The end result: if you felt upset during the time of that study and used Facebook a lot, you may have been made purposefully upset as a social experiment.  You may have spent time feeling like shit because some researchers wanted to see if they could make you feel like shit.

I’m not outraged.  I’m just… shrugging my shoulders.  They’re a jerk who continues to be a jerk, and we continue to date said jerk.  So what does that say about us?  I mean, at what point does it look ridiculous to sputter, “but he’s such a jerk!” and not leave?  Or utilize the site differently?

Facebook is a hotel.  I stay in hotels all the time, when it’s to my advantage.  When it gives me a place to keep my things when I’m visiting someplace away from home.  But I never confuse a hotel with my home.  I mean, a hotel is a hotel.  People have the right to come in and out of my room at the hotel.  I can’t change aspects of the room to suit me in a hotel.  I can’t demand new curtains or a different bed.  I take what I get when I go in a hotel.  When the hotel service is shitty, I complain or when it’s really bad, I don’t go back.  But that’s about all I have in my corner; the right to walk.

Whereas my blog is my home.  I own my blog because I self-host, but even if you rent your space via free blogging software, you have more control over your space than you do at Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or… every other site.  I don’t just put my things there; I make it my own, and I give people a place to find me and communicate with me.  You will always see everything I post here because I’m not tweaking an algorithm so you only see some posts and not others.

There are people who find living in a hotel less hassle.  Like the George Clooney character in Up in the Air.  He didn’t need his own apartment; didn’t have possessions that he needed to keep anywhere except in his suitcase.  And that is totally cool.

But if you are not really a live-out-of-a-hotel-room person, then you should not give up your blog.  You don’t need to write long posts.  YOU CAN MICRO BLOG IN YOUR OWN BLOG SPACE.  There is a blogger I used to read who wrote three sentence posts several times a day.  That was it: she took the concept of Twitter and utilized it in her own space.  Brilliant.  It took a few seconds to read her posts.  The comments tended to be brief too.  But she owned all of it.

I didn’t have to worry about an algorithm keeping some posts from me and giving me others.  I saw everything.

I am happy to jump from blog to blog in order to know definitively that I am seeing everything rather than having the flow of information controlled by a third party for their own gain.  Facebook has always controlled the flow of information — not just when they’re performing studies on us — making it difficult for people to see what they want to see vs. what Facebook wants them to see.  There are pages I’ve favourited that never show up in my feed.  And people who are on my Friend list yet their updates never pass over my screen.  I am already clicking over to see people’s walls so I can see all of their posts.  It would be much easier to have that information appear on their blog and flow into my rss reader.

I’m not giving up my Facebook account, but I don’t post things in that space that I care about.  All of those thoughts go here.  If you care about people seeing your thoughts, you should post them on your blog too.  Because people may see them as they float by on Facebook or Twitter.  Or they may not.  That’s the problem with hotel living; you’re at the mercy of the hotel owner.

And the hotel owner just proved himself to be a little sadistic.

The second to last post dissecting our relationship to the greater blogosphere and social media community.

Image: Ali T via Flickr

Popularity is a comparative term, and we all crave it for different reasons.  Sure, you may say that you don’t care if you’re popular, but of course you do, even if it’s only popularity within your small, inner circle.  No one wants to be unpopular.  I mean… just think of the company you keep in the unpopular category.  Unfortunately (or fortunately?), most of us will never achieve widespread popularity and will instead have to settle for a low-level popularity or non-popularity.

In most places in life, I’m non-popular, so it’s a familiar, comfortable spot.  For instance, I was non-popular in high school.  I certainly wasn’t popular — that is clear since people from high school rarely remember me — but I also wasn’t unpopular — no one tormented me.  I was just non-popular.

It is easy to be non-popular as much as it is annoying to be non-popular.  I mean, if you’re striving for popularity, you obviously haven’t reached it if you’re still non-popular.  BUT it is easy to be non-popular because you are (1) usually left alone, (2) don’t have to deal with the stress of being popular, and (3) don’t have to chase the bar of popularity since you’re not really in the race.  Popularity is an always moving bar, subject to your own perspective.  A case in point: you may see me as popular whereas I may see myself as non-popular.  And we’ll just have to agree to disagree since popularity is like the most subjective-y subjective thing ever.

So no one wants to be unpopular since being unpopular is akin to being unliked.  Brussels sprouts, for instance, are unpopular with kids.  If you Google, “unpopular vegetable,” they come up as the first image.  So, no one wants to be unpopular and Brussels sprout-y*, and yet, simply by existing in the world and coming into contact with other human beings — online and offline — we find ourselves, at times, decidedly unpopular.  Unliked.  Or, if it’s not ourselves being unliked, it’s our opinion or our blog post or our word choice.  And those times of being unliked are about twenty times louder than an equal amount of time being liked or a non-entity.  We can usually wrap our mind around being non-popular, but it is very hard to sit with the feeling of being unpopular.

Ever receive ten positive comments and one negative one?  Which one(s) sticks with you the rest of the day?  Do you bask in the ten, or do you worry about the one?

I worry about the one.

Because no one wants to be known if it means being unpopular.  I mean, better to not be recognized, not be known, than be known as someone with terrible ideas or a whiny personality or… whatever negative traits people toss your way.  And really, sometimes, with the way we build people up and then tear them down, it is a scary thing to be popular knowing how quickly you’ll descend to unpopularity with one wrong move.  Whereas the non-popular generally get to remain quietly non-popular.

In the book I’m reading, the main character sums up the whole reason why we want to be popular, we want to be known, we want to be cherished, and it call comes down to permanence and our cognition that we won’t be on this planet for very long:

Most people would trade everything they know — everyone they know — they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered.  We all know we die.  We all know the world is too big for us to be significant.  So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.

When we say we want to be acknowledged, to have our opinion be heard and count; when we say that we want to make a difference, we are talking about all of that in positive terms.  I mean, no one goes around saying, “I just want to have a negative impact on this world.  I want to make people miserable and be remembered forever as a bastard.”  No, when we say we want to make a difference, we want to make a positive difference.  When we say we want to be acknowledged, we don’t want someone to use our comment section to say, “I heard you… AND YOU’RE TOTALLY WRONG.”  What we mean is that we want… well… popularity, which means simply, “regarded with favour, approval, or affection.”

Most of us don’t want to take over the whole Internet and become a household name.  We just want to be regarded with favour, approval, or affection.  Not such a big thing to ask.  But striving for it, especially when you see other people achieving it, is humbling… sometimes demoralizing… other times confusing… and every once in a while, the road to achieving it ourselves.

What guidelines do you use to define popularity, and do you believe that all attention is good since it is still attention?  Would you rather be non-popular than known but struggling against the backlash that often accompanies the attention of popularity?

* I happen to like Brussels sprouts.

I will tell you a secret.

I think about deleting my blog pretty much every day.  Well, maybe not every day.  But certainly once a week.  If I’m not thinking about deleting my blog, I’m thinking about deleting my Facebook account or my Twitter account.  Every time the idea comes to me, it feels tenable, rational.  And then I start thinking it through and arrive at the same conclusion that I reach every single time.

You guys mean too much to me.

What hurt about leaving college wasn’t the end of classes or because I really loved my apartment.  What hurt was saying goodbye to the people.  We would never be all-together in that space again.  And even if we managed to drag the core group together for a reunion, the supporting characters likely wouldn’t be there.  And even if we could get all the supporting characters AND the core group in one space at the same time — a Sisyphean task — then something else would have changed.  The stores or the professors or the colour of the chairs at the student union’s lake pavilion.

Of course things changed while we were there in college.  Stores closed and our chancellor left to work for President Clinton and two bars burned down.  Friends came and went.  The people I was friends with senior year weren’t really the people I was close to (with few exceptions) freshman year.  But the changes were so tiny that we adjusted accordingly.  We were in the moment.

And being in this blog is about being in the moment.  It’s about recording the moment, but it’s also about interacting with all of you in the moment.  There are changes to the blogosphere every day.  When I look back at whom I was reading daily and whom I emailed with regularly eight years ago, I can only point to a handful of people who are still in my life.  And yet the changes have been so gradual — a tapering off of posts here and an increase in emailing there — that I rarely notice the shift.

I get a taste of how out-of-touch I feel when I go offline for a bit, such as when we’re on vacation.  It takes me a few days to catch up and feel like I know what is happening with you.  I think those small breaks are healthy reminders to how much my relationships here mean to me.

Because if I were to walk away and ever try to come back, it would be like trying to recreate college after graduation.

I could have something entirely different — in the same way that graduate school was entirely different from my undergraduate years — and maybe it would be just as good, but I couldn’t recapture this.

So I remember that, and I don’t hit delete on my blog or social media accounts.  Even when I start freaking out about online privacy.  Even when I get a rash of shitty emails.  Even when I’m filled with a desire to play Hay Day and not read another word; not be challenged to see another person’s point-of-view.  When writing a post feels like one.more.thing.on.my.to.do.list.

Because the truth is, I can’t remember a time when I dedicated the time to writing or reading personal blogs (I make the distinction because I don’t always feel the same way about impersonal media sites) and didn’t emerge from the act feeling as if it were time well-spent.  I may have gone in dragging my heels with a don’t wanna attitude, but I exited my screen time feeling as if I had gotten something off my chest or had a difficult thought make sense or learned something about myself or learned something about someone else or saw the world from a different angle.

So those are my thoughts on my eight year blogoversary.  I have written in this space for eight straight years, for the most part, on a daily basis, even if I don’t post every single thing I write.  2920 days of blogging.  3001 posts.  A pretty good run, nu?

Here’s to another eight years of not deleting my blog.  And in case it isn’t clear, please don’t delete yours.

Still talking about the blogosphere and social media.

Image: Ali T via Flickr

A long time ago (well, long in blogosphere terms), there was a movement called naked blogging.  The term meant different things to different people, but the general idea was to blog with absolute transparency.  To admit to your foibles.  To celebrate your accomplishments.  To not create a persona but instead to let it all hang out, announcing to the world, this is who I am, with no boundaries between yourself and the reader.

There is a lot of good that can be said for naked blogging.  It can be beneficial to the writer to own their past, laying bare a struggle such as alcoholism, or make sense of something emotional, akin to therapy.  A lot of us engage in a form of naked blogging by writing frankly about infertility.  We don’t sugarcoat it or sweep it under the rug.  There is a lot of good that comes from putting the good, bad, and the ugly parts of your story online.

And it’s clear how the reader benefits from naked blogging.  Nothing makes you feel less alone than going online and seeing someone else discussing something that affects you too.  In small towns, where people may not feel comfortable speaking out about a sensitive topic, to be able to come online and read someone else’s experience: it’s priceless.  It has likely saved lives.  I fully believe that while there are people who feed off of someone else’s experience, growing more anxious or upset than they would have if they had never heard the other person’s story — borrowing trouble, as some would call it — I believe that there are just as many who are quelled by someone else’s experience.  Who stop feeling abnormal in general and realize that they’re only abnormal in comparison to their small, inner circle.  Online, there are thousands of infertile women I connect with even though in my face-to-face world, I don’t know many who have had a similar reproductive experience.

It makes me feel like I’m part of a larger whole vs. being an anomaly.

Even though I rarely hear the term “naked blogging” anymore — probably because it leads to all sorts of uncomfortable Google searches — we do hear a lot about transparency.  Accountability.  Honesty.  Authenticity.  Truthfulness.  All those terms are positive terms.  I can’t think of a mainstream blogger with a large readership (let’s say larger than 5000 visitors per day) who currently blogs anonymously.  Sure, there are people who still use their blogging handle, but for the most part, with a quick search, we can find their real name because they’ve given us their real name.  They needed to do so once they got book deals or speaking gigs.  And the reality is that humans are too curious: once someone enters the mainstream, it’s a matter of time before enough digging reveals someone’s identity.  But most of the time, the person steps forward with their own identity after a brief time period of anonymity.

I think that there is a layer of honesty and authenticity on pseudonymous blogs that doesn’t exist under people writing under their real name, a freeing element when talking in depth about grief or anxiety that people wouldn’t feel comfortable stating if they knew that their boss or their mother or their best friend was going to read it.  But being hidden isn’t a coveted trait, you know?  We associate it with trolls, the dregs of the Internet.  They use anonymity to say whatever is on their mind thinking that it will never be traced back to their name.  And what they say is usually cruel.  Most people don’t go anonymous to say positive, kind things.  So we’ve started to think of anonymity as a negative trait, when it obviously isn’t when utilized well.

But under our real names, I’ve always wondered when modest blogging would catch on.  It’s certainly not as interesting; this idea of reserving thoughts just for yourself.  Circumspection instead of nakedness.  Kindness instead of blunt honesty.

I always think of that Jim Carrey film, Liar Liar and how everyone was destroyed by his honesty.  We sometimes need filters in order to allow other people to have self-esteem.  And in general, it’s sometimes better not to know what people think.  Not just what they think about us, but what they think about the world.  Sometimes ignorance really is bliss; and I don’t mean ignorance in the negative sense.  Sometimes it really is better not to know.

Do you think we can benefit from not knowing things.  Do you have a great respect for a blogger who lets it all hang out, or do you feel as if there are some things best left obscured or reserved?  Are you drawn to naked blogging, and would you want to hear an honest assessment of yourself, or do you think that it’s sometimes unhealthy to know all? (Even if our curiosity usually gets the best of us.)

We’re at the turning point in our discussion on the blogosphere and social media.

Image: Ali T via Flickr

There used to be a guy who worked at Politics and Prose — my favourite bookstore — who knew my reading habits so well that he could recommend or dismiss with frightening accuracy.  Let’s call him Bookstore Boy.  There were books that he saved me from buying (and when I checked them out of the library, he was totally right — I returned them without reading them) and others that I would have never found if he hadn’t pointed them out.  He introduced me to Jasper Fforde (and made the store a lot of money because that man wrote a lot of books) and kept me away from… well… I won’t list those authors here out of politeness.  Mostly because what he was telling me was that he didn’t think I would enjoy those books.  And he was almost always right.

I really appreciated Bookstore Boy and was amazed that he could do this for so many customers.  I wasn’t the only person who got his recommendations.  Somehow he kept all his regular customer’s preferences inside his brain.  And yeah, I probably bought more books that I would have under other circumstances because I felt honoured that someone paid close attention to my reading habits and could pinpoint which pieces of traditional literature I would enjoy and which ones would bore me.

Bookstore Boy no longer works there.  The current staff no longer knows me.  It definitely has affected my shopping habits to be without his guidance.

It felt good when Bookstore Boy paid attention to me and curated my reading list, so I don’t know why it feels like such a violation when a data mining company amasses a list of my preferences using an algorithm and tries to feed me advertisements they think would resonate with me.  Especially since I put that information out there.  Bookstore Boy operated under a lot of guesswork as to which books would resonate with me, because he knew it wasn’t just subject matter.  That the voice of the narrator played a huge role in whether or not I connected with the book.  There was a much greater chance for Bookstore Boy to get it wrong, but I never minded when he stepped in to take a book out of my hands and replace it with something he thought I’d like more.  Whereas data companies are merely feeding me — via ads on the side of Facebook or Gmail — what I already said I liked.

With the Bookstore Boy, it was flattering.

With the data mining company, it feels like a violation.

When Bookstore Boy told me I would like Jasper Fforde, I confidently purchased the first book on his recommendation.

When Barnes and Noble tells me that I may like this author, it feels like a stalker breathing down my neck.

Data mining companies have — on average — about 1500 pieces of information about you.  Yes, you.

That’s a lot of information.  There are a little under 314 million Americans.  That means that they have at least 1,500 pieces of information on about 2/3rds of all Americans.  And less information — but they still have information — on 1/3rd of all Americans.  If you are currently an adult living in the US that uses the Internet, chances are you fit into that 2/3rds category.

And for the most part, so what?  What does it matter if Barnes and Noble knows I like dystopian fiction?  What does it matter if a site knows where I like to buy pizza or where I go on vacation or which activities my kids enjoy?  Who cares?  They can serve me ads all they want, and it’s always my decision whether I buy something.  If you look at it from a helpful angle, giving me targeted ads that actually reflect my interests is more helpful than getting bombarded with a lot of noise, most of it non-applicable to my life.  For instance, I like hearing about new books.  If the ads I got were for new books, and an algorithm could fine tune the work of a human, somehow being programed to know which sort of books not only overlapped by genre but by type of voice… well… it would be like having a virtual version of my Bookstore Boy.

So why does it feel so damn creepy when a site essentially says — like a stalker — I know you.  I know all about you.  I’m watching you.  I want to be close to you.  What is the difference between Facebook and a stalker?  Because they sort of look like the same thing sometimes.  Especially once we remove the human contact afforded by my Bookstore Boy.  In both cases, the goal was to move a product, sell books.  But in one, I had the warmth of human contact guiding the process.  And in the other, I have a cold algorithm which feels as if it takes much more than it gives.  It feels like someone walking on my heels, chanting, “Buy something!  Buy something!  What about this?  What about that?  Buy!”

And amid all of this, I need to say that I get a large chunk of my book recommendation these days from Amazon’s customers-also-bought ticker midway down the page.  It feels a little bit like a hands-off Bookstore Boy, quietly stating, “this is what other people also liked who liked this book.  If it matters to you.”

As a side note, the Daily Dot had a post recently about privacy online that said, “If data is the most-coveted resource of our time, we should harvest and mine it sustainably.”  If we harvest data too quickly, in a far-reaching collection frenzy, people will get scared and stop putting stuff online.  But if we mine it sustainably, then data should be there for the taking for years and years to come.  Sort of a scary thought, nu?

If we’ve put it online; if we’ve listed all sort of details on our social media sites, liking companies and checking in with our location when we go to a store or restaurant, knowing full well that it will be used to sell us something in the future, is it really a violation?  And why do people call it a violation when we’ve offered up all the information in the first place and all another person (or computer) has done is pull together all the facts into one, neat document?