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.

Welcome back to IComLeavWe. It stands for International Comment Leaving Week, but if you say it aloud, doesn’t it sounds like “I come; [but] leave [as a] we”? And that’s sort of the point. Blogging is a conversation and comments should be honoured and encouraged. I like to say that comments are the new hug–a way of saying hello, giving comfort, leaving congratulations. Here is the vital information, pure and simple (a more detailed set of rules follows below the list):

• The list opens the 1st of every month. It remains open until the 21st. You can add yourself at any point. The list is open to everyone in the blogosphere–blog writers and/or blog readers.
• Add yourself to the list by filling out this form after adding the icon below: The July list is now closed.  The August list will open on 7/27.
• Click here to cut-and-paste this bit of code to add to your sidebar (if you have the old code from another month, remove it and replace it with this one). You need to add the icon or a link to the current list on your blog (see below) and will not be added until it’s up.
• Commenting kicks off every month on the 21st. Please mark it somewhere (calendar, post-it note taped to your computer…), though I will be sending out an email reminder on the 20th. Commenting week runs from the 21st to the 28th. Every day, leave 5 comments and return 1 comment for a total of 6 comments. You are highly encouraged to choose the blogs you comment on from the participants list below, but this is not required.
• I will send a second email on the 28th to remind you to remove the icon from your blog.
• Read below if you want to find out about Iron Commenters.
• The commenting ends on the 28th. We catch our breath and the whole thing starts again the next month on the 1st. Drop in and out according to what is happening in your life between the 21st and the 28th.

The July 2014 List

1. Stirrup Queens (twins, books, writing)
2. The Empty Cookie (neonatal loss, paganism, living children)
3. Climbing the Pomegranate Tree (FET, hysteroscopy, MFI)
4. Muddy Boots and Diamonds (children, ppd, life)
5. Four Years Later… (secondary infertility, IUI, stillborn)
6. Comatised (love, life, survival)
7. Recovering Beauty (love, life, recovery)
8. Stellar (adventures, life, love)
9. Everything Christine (adventures, life, love)
10. Constant in the Darkness (open adoption, parenting, adopting again!)
11. Baby, Borneo or Bust (parenting, expat life, cooking)
12. Breathe Gently (pregnant-through-IVF, FET, toddler-mum)
13. The One In Eight Couple (1 IVF miracle, 1 snow embie, FET)
14. Styler Chick Magazine (fashion, beauty, lifestyle)
15. Life of an Army Wife (army, donor gametes, pregnancy)
16. Amateur Nester (infertility, faith, encouragement)
17. Life’s Little Bump (IVF, faith, miscarriage)
18. Torthúil (pregnancy, infertility, health)
19. Waiting for Baby Bird (infertility, PCOS, faith)
20. Creating a Family (blog infertility, adoption, parenting)
21. Hopeful Luna (infertility, IVF, nutrition)
22. This International Life (travel, expat life, Scotland)
23. In Due Time (grief, loss, faith)
24. Wistfulgirl’s World (adoption, foster care, parenting)
25. I Can Do This (twins after miscarriages)
26. The M House (adoptive mom, family, life after loss)
27. A Little Bit More (TTC, PCOS, life)
28. Life As I Know It (life, twins, singleton)
29. The Quest for a Tiny Human (infertility, IVF, fur babies)
30. Birds, Bees, and Medicine (pregnancy, IVF, psychology)
31. The July list is now closed.  The August list will open on 7/27.

Q: What if I miss a day?

A: Catch up the next day by doubling your comments–12 comments instead of 6.

Q: What if I have two blogs? Can I sign up twice, listing both blogs?

A: Yes, but you also need to double your comments. If you have two blogs listed, you should be leaving 12 comments per day.

Q: What is an Iron Commenter?

A: Not for the faint-of-heart. People who wish to be an Iron Commenter and be entered on the Iron Commenter honour roll need to leave a comment on every blog on the participants list (exceptions are blogs that require you to have a special log-in, such as some LiveJournal accounts or other similar situations). You can spread out this commenting any way you wish over the whole week, but the final comment needs to be left by midnight on the 28th (EST). Reaching Iron Commenter status is done on an honour system. Please email me if you earn Iron Commenter status so I can add you to the wall of honour.

Q: Why do I have to add that bit of code to my sidebar?

A: The code is the latest icon (the icon changes colour every month so you know that you’re on the right list). This month, the icon is blue, the next month it will be purple, etc. The reason is two-fold: (1) it enables more people to find out about IComLeavWe and (2) it gives you easy access to the current list once the commenting week actually begins and better ensures that you’ll use it. Too many times, people sign up and forget to actually do IComLeavWe and this icon gives you a daily reminder (with the dates on it) every time you open your own blog. The icon is linked back to the current list. On the 28th, remove the icon from your blog. A new one will be created for the next month.

Q: It’s the 23rd and I just saw this for the first time on my friend’s blog! I want to join the list–why can’t I?

A: Because IComLeavWe happens every month, once the list is closed, it’s closed. If you’re finding out about this on the 23rd, you can’t join the current month. But leave yourself a note to check back in a week on the 1st and you can sign up for the next month.

Q: You said the list closes on the 21st. Well, it’s still the 21st where I am. Why aren’t you moving my information onto the list?

A: All dates and times are U.S. Eastern Standard Time (UTC/GMT -5 hours). The list closes around 11 p.m. EST on the 21st.

Q: What if no one comments on my blog and I have no comments to return?

A: Well, that really doesn’t happen for the most part, but in that case, simply choose another blog and add an additional comment. The goal is to hit 6 comments daily as a minimum. Going over that is fantastic and encouraged.

Q: Mel, my question wasn’t covered at all. What do I do?

A: Email me; I’m quite friendly. It helps to place “IComLeavWe” in the subject line. You could also check this post which contains the history of IComLeavWe and see if you can glean anything there.

Looking for the comment section? It has been closed on this post. Use the form in the directions to add yourself to the list.

This is the 500th Roundup.

Sort of.

The 500th Roundup coincides this week with my 8th blogoversary, though we’re still a few weeks out from the 8th anniversary of the Roundup.  I started it a few weeks after I started my blog.  Part of me didn’t want to write the Roundup for a few weeks so the 500th Roundup could fall on the Roundup’s 8th anniversary.  But that seemed like a waste of Fridays.

The 500th Roundup is actually the 400th Roundup since the numbering got botched along the way, but still… 400 times?  400 times I’ve sat down to write this post.  400 times I’ve highlighted a few posts I’ve read that week.  I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve missed writing the Roundup.  That’s a damn good run.

So happy milestone, little Roundup.

And thank you, everyone, for reading the Roundup.  For some of you, about 400 times.

*******

I had to get blood drawn this week, so I decided to take the twins with me so they could see that blood draws aren’t scary.  And by “not scary,” I meant that I planned to lie to them and tell them that needles don’t bother me.  Sorry, kids, if you’re reading this.

So after pattering on for the entire car ride about how this is only going to take 45 seconds and the fact that I can’t drink coffee until after it’s over is more painful than the blood draw itself, we get into the lab and I get a phlebotomist who is not interested in having this blood draw be a positive experience for the kids to witness.  I tell her which vein is the easiest to use, but she opts for another one.  I ask her for the butterfly needle, and she pulls out the more intimidating-looking standard one.  So the kids are getting a little squicked out.  (Thank you, Knottedfingers, for the best word!)

And then she can’t get the blood out.

She’s wiggling the needle, trying to coax out blood, and I am grinning wildly at the twins, saying, “see, doesn’t hurt a bit.”  And then I start to feel clammy, as if I am going to pass out.  And the Wolvog nervous points out that this is taking a lot longer than 45 seconds.  He’s been counting for a bit, and really, we’re getting closer to two minutes and there still isn’t any blood.

And then, right as I am about to set my forehead on the table and confess that I am a huge liar, the blood starts flowing.  The clammy feeling passes and the phlebotomist finishes up.  We leave and walk through the parking lot toward the cup of coffee I stored in the car.

Here is the reality: I’ve convinced myself that needles hurt a lot more than things like a trip to the dentist or a Pap smear or a dozen other appointments where I don’t get worked up beforehand.  But that sharp instrument the dentist uses to poke the gums?  That actually hurts more than a needle.  And a speculum is uncomfortable and in for a lot longer than a needle.  I’m not being a total liar when I tell the kids that it won’t hurt at all when they get blood drawn this fall for the first time.

Right?

Sometimes I can’t believe that I used to get blood drawn in the morning and give myself an injection in the evening.  That I dealt with needles all the time.  Maybe I’m just out of practice.

*******

Time for your weekly nag:

This is just your friendly nudge to do your weekly backup.  I know, I know, who has the time to create backups on a weekly basis?  No one.  But you still need to do it and forgo ten minutes of something else, once a week.  Right now, before you do anything else, use this post to roll through a quick backup of your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Reading the Roundup on the go and don’t have the ability to do your backup right now?  Email yourself a copy of the Roundup so that the email will serve as a visual reminder to get this task done.  Ten minutes of your time once a week may save you a major loss of time and data down the road.  Don’t have regrets.  So, on your marks, get set, back up!

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None.  No one found a post last week that moved them or made them think or cracked them up? (Yes, this is a guilt trip, but it is a milestone Roundup.)

Okay, now my choices this week.

If You Don’t Stand for Something has a moving post marking the 5th year of trying to build her family.  She writes, “5 years.  It should get easier. Or more tolerable. Or you hope that you just become desensitized to it all.  Anything to help cope with it.  But instead, after five years, I still come home crying and breaking down.”  It’s a raw post that lays bare the reality of infertility.

A+ Effort muses about how far they are from adding a second child to their family, reflecting on how her own relationship to her sister informed the dream she had for her family’s formation.  There’s a lot that resonated with me from the post, and again, it should be one of those required reading posts for anyone who doles out the solution of “why don’t you just adopt!” as the answer to infertility.  I love the mindfulness with which she moves forward in building her family, and while she may think she needs to buck up, I think she has a legitimate reason to vent.

A Little Bit More wonders how others perceive her childlessness and tries to see herself through their eyes, especially after a woman jokes around with her about how terrible children can be.  She explains, “She was talking like she wanted me to commiserate with her, but I just kept trying to change the subject. When I left, all I could think about was is that what she thinks of me?”  But moreover, she opens up a conversation with her post on how not having kids doesn’t equal not wanting kids.  Or hating kids.

Lastly, My Lady of the Lantern has an aching post about the child she is carrying and the child she lost, and how death keeps people eternally one age as the rest of us change.  It is a post filled with wishes.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s a milestone Roundup — 500 (er… 400).  I don’t really love needles.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 20th and June 27th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

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.