Category — Blogiquette or On Blogging

So I’m reading a book, and it is affecting me greatly.  I want to talk about the book without naming the book until I’m done talking about the book*.  Indulge me?  In the end, I’ll gather up all the posts that have been connected to the book, name the book, and then… uh… I’ll go and read something else.  Don’t worry; none of these posts will reveal any spoilers.

I’m aware that this is a little ass-backwards in the vein of book discussion.

But this book is unique in that it feels a bit like an optical illusion.  When I look at it from this angle, it makes total sense.  And when I look at it from that angle, it looks bat-shit irrational.  Well, which one is it?  Best idea in the world or worst idea in the world?  Because it can’t really be both at the same time.  Right?

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I’m starting with a topic that additionally keep popping up like a weed online lately.  I saw two different posts in two different places in the same week, and this topic also bubbles up in my book.  Do we have the right to be forgotten?

Image: Jlhopgood via Flickr

Both posts riffed off of the same EU ruling that allowed search results (tying a man to a negative experience) to be removed from the Internet.  The man argued that constantly having his name tied publicly to the foreclosure of his house was a violation of his privacy.  The court agreed and ruled for the removal of the auction notice.

It makes sense.  I mean, anyone who could be financially affected by this man would have the foreclosure turn up in a privately conducted search, such as a bank researching a prospective client.  And the general public doesn’t need to know about a person’s foreclosure to make decisions in the same way that a person might want to know if they live next door to a child molester.  It could potentially socially affect the man if every time someone Googled his name, it popped up with that information — which, by the way, is now 16 years old.  It’s embarrassing, I guess.  And it’s information without context — you know about the foreclosure, but you don’t know the circumstances to bring him into foreclosure.  So… yes… makes sense to remove that sort of information from the Internet at someone’s request.

Right?

Of course, some groups are decrying it as Internet censorship.  That to delete anything from the Internet — any information — is an act of changing history, the conversation, the public record.  That makes sense too.  I mean, how do we determine what can be removed and what cannot?  What if President Clinton wanted his relationship with Monica Lewinsky to be stricken from the Internet?  Would we do that?  Their affair isn’t information the general public needs in order to make a decision.  Sort of like the foreclosure.  But… can you imagine removing something like that?  A piece of history?  And really, what if President Clinton wanted it removed and Monica Lewinsky wanted it up?  Whose desire to have the story removed or out there wins?

So… no… when you look at it that way, it doesn’t make sense to remove information from the Internet.

All of this ties in with this idea of whether or not we have the right to be forgotten.  We certainly have the right to be remembered; by belonging to any society, we participate in the right of public record keeping.  Our existence is noted and counted.  Our death is too.  Those are both legal entitlements which give us access to more legal entitlements.

But what about the right to be forgotten?  Do we have the right to erase the fact that we existed?  We obviously can’t force people to forget us — at least, not until we enter an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But let’s start at the largest level — our relationship with companies, organizations, or agencies.

We already pointed out above an example where someone wanted to opt out of having an agency (or, I believe in this case the agency gave the information to a newspaper who produced an ad about the foreclosure) place their information online.  What about the other direction?  Should it be an individual right to close a social media account — for a person to tell a company that even if they put their information out there willingly, they would now like to remove it?

Were you aware that you give away this right with certain sites?  That spaces on the Internet, such as Facebook or WordPress or Blogger or LinkedIn or Evernote or Starbucks or Barnes and Noble… well, the list is long… specifically state in their terms of service that you cannot delete your account and remove its presence from their servers?  That once you set up an account, once you upload your first status message or your first picture, you lose control of that data.

Which isn’t a big deal if you look at it from one angle.  I mean, why would I care if something I say is on a server in some remote room… somewhere?  I don’t say very interesting things.  At least, they’re not very interesting or controversial in today’s society.  Based on what I know now, I feel comfortable with everything I say online.

But what about tomorrow?  Or the next day?

The world could change, and something that seems benign now could become anathema.  Twitter takes over the world and starts punishing all former Facebook users.  We quickly try to delete our accounts to save our lives but… WE CAN’T!  Or maybe it’s not even that outlandish a scenario.  Maybe I become famous later and someone digs up my past blatherings; things I thought would only be seen by my friends or things I thought I deleted upon second thought.  Yeah, when I look at it from that angle, I’d sort of like the ability to control my data.

If I have the right to sign up for an account and upload information, I’d like the ability to delete an account and remove my information.  I would like the right to be forgotten by Facebook and WordPress and Blogger, etc. even if I know that I cannot control being forgotten by actual human beings.  But in doing so, am I committing Internet censorship?  Am I trying to rewrite history?  Change the story?

This is getting too long, so I’ll end there and pick up this thread after you’ve gotten a chance to weigh in…

* I want to talk about the real world implications of the book without pulling in a discussion of the plotline and characters in this book.  Also, I haven’t finished it yet, so I would hate for someone to spoil any of the twists for me.  But if you’re dying to know the book before I get to the last post about it, email me and I’ll tell you.  Not a secret; I just want these questions that arise from the book rather than the book itself to be the focus.

I want you to understand why I read your blog.

By which I mean, the active, continuous reason why I read your blog.  Of course I came over in the first place because something piqued my interest.  You had a similar situation to mine.  Or you had a thought-provoking post that someone linked to.  Or you had an interesting blog name that made me click over for a moment.  There are plenty of reasons I could catalogue that make me give a blog a first look.

But what makes me keep reading a blog and add it to my blog reader?  Because there are lots of blogs that I visit once or twice.

There is really only one reason why I would keep reading a blog, and that is because I connected in some way with the writer and his/her voice.

I like the way the person writes — their choice of phrasing, similar to why I like certain book authors — or I feel like there is something in the voice or ideas presented that makes me think that if the person lived in my town, we’d be friends.  So I add their blog to my reader because I respect them as a writer, and as long as their writing style doesn’t stray too far from why I originally liked them, I’ll keep reading.  I expect their subject matter to change, after all, we are all in flux and have different aspects of our life come to the forefront at various times.  Some topics resonate with me more than others, but there is no one I read who writes solely about one thing and one thing only.  By which I mean, they may think they write about one thing, but really, they write about their life.  Or they write about cooking, but they throw in a lot of stories about their dog.  Or they have an adoption blog, but they also sometimes get a little political.

Yes, I will admit that I sometimes skim a post if the subject matter doesn’t hold my interest, but overall, my continued reading of a blog is directly tied to the voice.  The only constant I need is whatever drew me to your personality in the first place.

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There have been a lot of posts lately worrying about changes in the blogosphere and whether or not to keep writing and whether readers have floated away.  These are all legitimate thoughts, but they’re sort of touching-the-elephant musings.  We all have our personal observations, but they’re coloured by our own personal experiences, and that includes what we are doing or not doing.

The first thing I always ask when someone comments that the blogosphere has changed is “has your writing and reading habits changed?”  That usually points to the issue: they’ve become self-conscious in their subject matter and stopped writing, they’ve felt uninspired for topic ideas, they’ve run out of time to write, they’ve stopped commenting as much because they’re reading from a phone.  Actions have consequences: if you change the way you blog, you will see a change in the way people read.

And those actions are what you are feeling when you’re touching the elephant.  It’s easy to feel that trunk or tail or tusk and use it to describe the whole animal.  But elephants and the blogosphere are both huge.  You can’t really get a sense of them if you only look at your own experience or that of a few people around you.

If you stop writing, people will stop reading.  If they suspect that you’re not comfortable in your own space, they will not be comfortable in your space. (Have you ever been to a party where the hosts have obviously fought right before you arrived?  And they’re sitting around in frosty silence?  It affects the party; it has to.  And the same goes for writers who don’t feel comfortable with what or where or to whom they’re writing.)  If you stop commenting, new readers will stop finding you and your readership will drop.

Luckily, there are answers too: Write.  Build a space where you are comfortable.  Read other blogs and comment; regularly.

And also, along the way, recognize that even if your blog has changed with age, underneath it all, regardless of whatever feelings you have to the aging process, it’s still your story.  Just your life; in word form.  We’re all like that too: I may have more grey hair than when I started writing in this space, crinkles around my eyes and lines in my forehead.  I look older.  But I’m still me.  And this blog is still an extension of me, a receptacle for my thoughts.  So no, nothing really looks like how it looked back in 2006.  But that’s okay because the important things — the spirit of this blog and the readership at the core — hasn’t changed all that much.

And all of this is to say that I don’t think that blogging has changed as much as people fear.  Has it changed?  Of course.  Again, everything — including blogging — is in flux.  But anyone who fears that the end of blogging is nigh needs to ask themselves if they’ve done anything to change their blog or the way they interact with the blogosphere.  And as a test, go back — for an extended period of time since change always takes time — to reading and writing as you used to read and write, and see if blogging now resembles blogging of yesteryear.  I’m willing to bet that at its core, it does.

I’m writing this in case you need reassurance to find your voice again.  Your voice is why your loyal core readership reads you.  Are there people who come to blogs when a person is experiencing something difficult because they thrive off the drama?  Yes.  But those aren’t the people you want to cater to or worry about because they aren’t sustainable or retainable.  They will float away to the next blog and feed off the drama there like a mosquito drinks blood.  And just as you wouldn’t work to actively keep mosquitoes biting you, there is no reason to attempt to keep that sort of blog reader.

Do you know how every person has a base weight that your body strives to return to; a happy weight that is easy to maintain?  Your blog has a base readership.  The numbers may go higher or lower based on external factors such as people linking to a post or getting a lot of Google juice or taking a blogging break, but overall, there is a base readership your blog strives to maintain.  That is your core.  When you push too hard to try to get that readership to go up, the core pulls you back down.  If you go away for a long time, starving your blog, your core pipes up when you return to remind you that your blog has gotten too thin.

Every blog has a core, even if that core only consists of five people.  And they read you because you are… YOU.  Isn’t that a powerful thought?  That there are people out there who care what you have to say.

Think of all the people you meet in your life that you don’t retain as a friend.  All the hundreds of people around you that you don’t connect with.  The same goes for blogs.  There are hundreds of blogs out there written by Jewish women or vegetarian women or mothers of twins or those experiencing infertility: all topics which resonate with me.  But I don’t read them.  Because for whatever reason, I didn’t connect with the voice.

So if you ever believe that people only read you for your situation, think again to all the people around you who share your interests and yet aren’t your close friend.  We don’t connect solely over shared experience because there are way too many people out there who share our experiences.  We connect over shared experience coupled with something else, a je ne sais quoi, that tells us that we like this person; we like their voice.

I like your voice.

Keep writing.

I read a post on Slate about the Pirahã who live in Brazil and have no words in their language for numbers.  The article explains:

The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a “small size or amount,” hoí, a “somewhat larger size or amount,” and baágiso, which can mean either to “cause to come together” or “a bunch.”

I was fascinated by the idea of anumeracy because I couldn’t imagine a world without numbers.  A world where I wasn’t constantly keeping track of time, measuring ingredients, or focusing on word count.

Image: Denise Krebs via Flickr

It made me wonder how social media would change if we had no sense of our stats.  Numbers dominate social media; rule it — more than quality content when we take things away from the personal.  We are numerically-focused on how often we post.  We consciously or unconsciously count up the number of comments, subscribers, daily readers.  We are reminded of our number of followers or friends every time we log into Twitter or Facebook.  And we internalize those numbers even when we don’t want to internalize those numbers.  They mean something to us.  They change how we view our space on the Web; especially when other people’s numbers are readily available for comparison.

How would social media change if we had no sense of how many followers we had?  If we had no sense of who or how many were reading our words?  Would we be more careful, mindful of the fact that we have no concept of our reach and therefore cautious about what we say lest it bite us in the ass?  Or would it be freeing to not constantly focus on whether blogging or the like is worth our time based on the number of people our words reach?

Short of closing the comment box, not installing blog metrics, and staying off of other social media sites, it’s impossible in our number-driven world to be completely clueless of your blog’s reach in the same way that you may not have a sense of just how many people in this world care about you but you certainly can count up the people you consider friends.  We always know the minimum amount even if we don’t always know the maximum.  But sometimes knowing that minimum can affect the quality, the scope, and the frequency of our posts.

How would you blog if there was no focus for anyone on numbers?

Writing begets writing.

Put down words on a page or screen every single day, think about future blog posts or storylines while you’re taking a shower, read a lot of other people’s words so your brain can pick up creative ways people string them, and it pretty much follows with few exceptions that the words you want — the ones that will go into your own blog posts or short story or novel or memoir or self-help book — will come to you when you need them.  It’s not that daily writers don’t get writer’s block, but when they do, it is usually tied to not knowing how to move the plot forward or structure the chapter.  Writer’s block like that is akin to staring at the chess board, trying to figure out your best move.  So I’m talking about how daily writing will stave off the sort of writer’s block where you stare at the screen, wanting or needing to write, and not knowing how to get started or get back into a long-standing project.

That’s what I mean by writing begets writing.

I approach writing in the same way breastfeeding women deal with their milk supply while on a business trip: pump and dump. (Well, I imagine since I wasn’t actually able to make breast milk.)  If they don’t pump, their boobs will hurt and their supply will go down.  But they have no place to store the milk or transport it home, so they dump the milk.  That milk is only expressed in order to get to the good breastfeeding later.  While they may have feelings of regret over the waste, they know going in that a pump and dump is what they need to do to get through the trip.

I do pump and dump writing all the time.  This post would have been pump and dump writing except that I ended up posting it.

Even when I don’t have time for it, I sit down for fifteen minutes and just write.  Whatever.  I don’t think about the quality, I don’t pluck at the words.  If I don’t know what I feel like writing, I grab ideas for posts by looking at other blogs or news sites.  And then, for a minimum of 15 minutes, I write (usually a blog post, but sometimes the beginning of a short story).  And then I dump those words.  They served their purpose: to keep the writing fluidity in my mind so I don’t get writer’s block down the road.

Pump and dump.

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How long I can go without writing and then still easily write the next time I sit down at the computer depends on how much momentum I’ve built with blog posts or the book.  I rate my writing mood on a 10-point system.  1 – 4 means I can’t write or it’s very painful to write.  I’m just sitting there, staring at the screen, feeling as if I’m wasting time.  5 – 6 mean that I maybe got a paragraph or two out of a four-hour writing session.  7 is one of those days when I stop and start a lot, but ultimately get a page or two.  An 8 is writing at a decent clip.  9 is a fantastic day when I churn out 10 pages (fine, most of it is dialogue, but it still counts) and I know I’m going to keep most of it.  10 is the best writing day ever.

I’ve never reached a 10.

I try to spend most of my time at an 8.  8 is my goal.  I find that when I push myself to have a 9-sort-of-day, I usually end up stressed out and not actually reaching a 9.  So a 9 comes about unexpectedly.  I aim for a good, solid B when it comes to writing.

If I’m consistently writing at an 8, I can take the weekend off and not stress it, and I’ll continue writing at an 8 on Monday.  If I’m writing below an 8, I need to spend some time with the project every day of the weekend to keep the momentum going.  If I don’t, that level 7 on a Friday becomes a level 5 (or lower!) on a Monday.  I would rather take a half hour on Saturday and Sunday to plug away at the scene than waste much more than an hour on Monday not getting writing work done.  It’s a trade-off.

I’ve been writing my blog for so long that I could probably take off a week without losing momentum.  More than a week without writing a post and I feel a little rusty.  Maybe it takes longer to write the next post than it should.  So I rarely take a week off.  I may not post anything that I write during that week (pump and dump), but I still tap out something in the Notes section of the iPad.

So yes, when people talk about how difficult it is to get momentum going with their blog after taking a break for a bit, I get it.  If I took time off, I could write a post here and there, but I wouldn’t be able to have control over my space, filling it somewhat daily.  I’d be at the mercy of ideas, and ideas don’t necessarily come when you want them to.  So I write daily posts even when I don’t publish daily posts just so I don’t enter that more-difficult-to-write zone.

My advice, if you want to keep a daily blog and are having trouble starting or finishing posts, or you want to write a book but are feeling stuck every time you sit down at the computer: write daily.

Put down the Candy Crush, Facebook, and Twitter and just sit there in front of the screen, even if all you do is stare at the cursor for a half hour.  Regardless of what comes out, when the half hour is done, get up from the computer and let it go.  Don’t stress about what you wrote (or didn’t write) nor feel too good about what you did write.  Good writing one day doesn’t necessarily mean good writing the next, so don’t be too proud of yourself.  And a terrible writing experience one day doesn’t necessarily mean that tomorrow will suck too.  Just treat writing as if it’s a task you must do to keep up supply: pump and dump, or pump and use.  But suck those words out of your brain so that your brain will in turn generate more words for you to use down the road.

That’s really the only way I’ve found to keep writing projects going and not have them become mentally painful down the road.  And during the times when I don’t take my own advice, I pay for it when I sit back down to write again.  Then I have to slog through levels 1 – 7 before I hit 8 again, though I know the only way to reach 8 is to put in that time, stare at the screen, pump and dump my words.

It is my blogoversary.  For seven years, I have shown up in this space.  I write pretty much daily.  I post about 5 times per week; sometimes more.  I leave about a quarter of my posts in draft; completed but unpublished.  There is no rhyme or reason to what I choose to post vs. what I choose to leave in draft forever.

I’ve seen blogging change a lot.  When I started, blogs were like little lights flickering from mountain top to mountain top, sending a signal across the land.  Now there are millions… billions?… of blogs.  Seven years ago, the blog was it, the end all and be all, the place you could find me.  Now, we’re expected to spread ourselves thinly across multiple platforms, keeping up with dozens of social media sites.  Or we’re encouraged to drop the blog and go ephemeral — throwing our thoughts into the fast-moving rivers of Twitter or Facebook instead of chiseling the words into slow-moving, semi-permanent blog posts.

Over the last seven years, I’ve seen memes come and go, trends take off and fizzle.  I’ve seen the blog be declared dead more times than I can count.

Which brings us to the most important piece of advice I have to give at this point:

Wait.

If you love blogging, if you get what you need simply from putting words on a screen, tune out the “experts” who tell you that you need to do this or that to be “successful.”  What does that even mean anyway?  Why measure yourself by someone else’s definition of a successful blogger?  Those blogging talking heads aren’t Merriam-Webster.  They do not get to define what makes or breaks a blogger.

YOU get to decide that.  We all individually get to decide that.

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Every few months, a new trend is floated into the blogosphere.  If you want to have a successful blog, you have to go visual!  You have to have images!  You have to be pinnable!  No… wait… to have a successful blog, you have to be on Twitter!  You have to have a lot of followers!  No… wait… to have a successful blog, you need to make your blog look like every single other space out there, so it doesn’t reflect your personality at all and instead drops you neatly into a single niche that you can present yourself in as an expert.

When all those ideas are floated by me, I nod.  And then I wait.  Because those speakers are anxious to make something happen, to make something go viral or find the next big thing.  And I’m happy to just be trucking along, putting words on a screen.  I get everything I need to get out of blogging; I don’t need to change this space or the way I write.  I like where I put my words.  I like the speed in which they come as well as how long they stick around for readers to find them.

The reality is that if you keep chasing all the things you’re supposed to do with your blog it will cease to be YOUR space in the same way that if you spend your life trying to be like someone else, you will miss you on being you.  I didn’t really get that when my parents would tell me that when I was a kid, and I was moaning that I wasn’t like this person or that person.  But I get it now.

So if Twitter is your thing, go do Twitter.  And if Facebook is your thing, go spend time on Facebook.  If you’re a big fan of hangouts, Google+ is for you.  Images make you happy?  Then there is Pinterest or Instagram.

But I like blogs.  I like reading them, and I like writing one.  So this is what I’m going to do, year after year after year, plodding along with the same thing and waiting when people tell me about the next big thing I need to do in order to be successful since it always changes anyway.

Thank you for being here for seven years.  Some of you have been here since the beginning.  Some of you have found this space quite recently.  And I’m grateful for each and every one of you who pick up my words, consider them, and share your own.