The explosion of tiny authors a-twitter is making me uneasy. One reason for this is politeness: until now, if someone who isn’t crazy, a bot or a seller of warez wishes to follow my updates, I have reciprocated, or blocked them without mercy. Now the pace at which curious strangers want to follow me is picking up, and the interests of these followers extending beyond my own. A choice is coming: keep blocking those whom I don’t want to follow, or give my twitterings up to the attention of genuine strangers? My TwitterFox extension rarely sleeps as it is; don’t make me install TweetDeck, people.
Another is rather unpleasant snobbery. I am not an early adopter in the true sense of the word by any means, but I enjoy my internet phenomena when they are of interest to millions rather than tens of millions. When everyone is talking about it, rather than mostly-everyone, it feels less fun.
The third reason is perhaps the inverse of the conventional complaint. I like to read what those are follow are reading, eating, drinking and thinking. Retweets and news tweets leave me feeling like the kid in the classroom whose classmate is smirking, “you’ll never guess what?” As with intoxicants and various sexual practices, I suppose the lesson is to abandon what you have tried and not liked without giving up the whole game.
Having said all this, I am enjoying the increasing integration of social media more generally. These posts are syndicated as notes to Facebook, my server space now allows me to set up blogs for friends who would like to give the art a try, and encountering those of you whom I know online in the various forums we frequent is fun, in the same way that even at the largest school social one expects to run into one’s friends several times in the course of the night. Contact–especially formed around personal narratives–breeds empathy and care if we are doin’ it right, and this then becomes a line of goodwill that extends into the offline life and the great gift of drinks and dinners.
My own inclination towards a blogger’s Glasnost, by which I mean allowing for greater integration of the various places in which I write, and a greater transparency of the pseudonym under which I write here, feels timely in this communal environment. In the course of keeping these pages in the various hosted forms through which they’ve passed, I’ve changed from writing as an antagonist, someone who imagines her audience to be at best in need of persuasion and at worst hostile, to writing in what I hope is a less defensive way (although with the ouroboros of my sentence construction, that distinction may be imperceptible to those with more linear modes of narrative composition).
I think this sense of change is intensified by the new opportunities to experiment that the move to my own servers has brought me. Thanks to Simple Scripts, setting up subsites on my own domain is easy. This new convenience synchronised unexpectedly last weekend when Ashburton Jay, Finnmar and I were discussing the copious breed records for Norwich Terriers past and present that are held in common. These are a valuable resource for any breeder studying the past combinations of dogs and looking at the results in health, form and function that were produced. (All Norwich Terriers are adorable but some have a more typey adorability than others.) However, the current form in which most of the records exist is as an OS9 file on a freeware family tree programme for which the OSX software was never written. This we pondered ruefully, since pedigree software proper is expensive and full of folderol, and doesn’t solve the problem of the records being in one geographical location only.
The señor had arrived home from work not long before this conversation began.
“What about a wiki?” he said. Thus my enthusiasm was fired, and so it is of building this that I find myself in the midst, skinning and tabling and editing and cross-checking for much of my spare time, like a sloth that can touch-type. I will reserve the URL for a little while, but here is a screen shot.
Ensconced in building esoteric website of limited general interest: this you might call Classic Internet. Wanting to see if I could put something else together with Drupal, I have also made this, which is going to be an ungainly hotchpotch of all kinds of things, I think. After the fact I would like it to be a place where our families and friends can upload their photos of each other on the day, but before that I would like a hub where guests can get the necessary details of when, where and what to expect (a step away from the floral-embossed, faux-calligraphic invitation notices) and a nuptially-themed space for me to do some cultural-and-gender-studies style hashing out of matrimonial ideas, all in the coruscating prose you know and allow me the courtesy of calling my norm.
I’m increasingly realising that part of the fun of having self-hosted sites is the behind-the-scenes mucking around, and when talking about such projects it’s difficult to separate the front and back ends, as it were. (I tried using these same concepts to talk about something else at a meeting yesterday and dissolved everyone more or less immediately into laughter. My informal resolution to find verbal alternatives to meta-this and meta-that may yet fail.) So you’ll understand me when I say that another motivation for the above-cited project is the fact a Drupal developer is coding a version of this WordPress theme for Drupal even as I write this. I cannot quite let go the thought of a whole hive of thematically similar pages using different content management systems. It’s the internet amateur’s version of the Coca-Cola assembly.
Most important of all, this is giving me something to do in the evenings other than housework and waiting for the señor to come home from the late shift, aware as I type that the all-but-last revisions to my manuscript are still incubating in my imagination, waiting for the final hatching that I sincerely hope will be soon. Constructive downtime, this is, enjoyed while I have it and before the new semester’s tide sucks my feet out from under me once more.
(Oh, and I’m going to Japan for a little while in a little while. That however is another story for another post.)
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Posterous
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting- I feel like moving away from greater integration at the moment. I like to keep my worlds separate. I don’t want most of my family members or my colleagues or students in my online life. (It may be that I’m a tad paranoid and secretive!)
Solve et Coagula, and more power to you my oroborotic friend.
I’m in a similar position. The Twitter followers I used to get were either people I knew or some guy in America who wanted to share his business opportunity hot links with me.
But now I’m getting followed by people in New Zealand who are just ordinary people, but I don’t know them. My Twitter feed is already heavy enough as it is. I don’t really need tweets from people I don’t know, talking about stuff I’m not particularly interested in.
Because I have an inbalance with followers and followings, a couple of times a week I do a search for @ replies that my non-followed followers have done. Because I care!
Robyn’s last post was Not so live any more, is it just?
I did a little bit of moaning about the Twitter on my video for today. Growing pains as Twitter becomes more popular I guess. For me it’s a matter of trying to find the right balance between having a Twitter feed that works for me and my desire to be polite to random strangers.
MTNW: I’m down with secrecy and paranoia! For me, things at work have changed a little in the last couple of years, not least because some narrative writing I did about my job was published in an academic journal and I have a bit more of a workplace identity of doing the kind of writing I do (although my colleagues don’t use the internet much and I doubt any of them read these pages). There’s also a flexibility, I think, that is a by-product of being outside PBRF-land. I’ve read plenty of articles in the Chronicle and so forth arguing that for tenured types, blogging itself is wasteful because all one’s public writing should be in peer-reviewed journals.
merc: To solve et coagula one must add edamus, bibamus, gaudeamus, the which translation, extraordinarily, I found rendered on Yahoo Answers.
Robyn: your etiquette suggestions are excellent and I am going to follow them myself. I think a lot of people will probably led their accounts idle once the buzz dies down.
Sarah: The desire to be polite to random strangers is strong in us, as strong as the rising inflection. Stephen Fry commented today (as most of us will have seen) that “Even though the only people talking about Twitter are the papers, the rest of us are just quietly doing it. It’ll calm down though”.
2108 ETA Here is Sarah’s Vimeocast on the topic.
Yes we can include those. Been to my second funeral this week. I am the enigmatic funeral guy, I just don’t have any on-the-fly-apt pithy sayings anymore.
I’m ruined for conversation, Twitter may help, or indeed it helps simply to watch people chatting to each other normally.
Widowers, widows, I feel are expected to be profound or crushed, fairly limiting conversation options. I’m probably just another narcissist.
merc’s last post was Clear.
I can imagine that the scrutiny of the widowed must be aggravating. Do not worry about that here; a picture of a cat is as welcome in the comments as any pithiness. And what are the comments for if not a little secondary narcissism, although I don’t think it bedevils your presence at all. I’m sorry your week has been funereal.
I find the public perfectly reasonable, except when we are in cars. I like the gravitas I pinch from a very Gothic role. In many ways it has been a wonderful week. Today’s was for a man who had role playing friends from way back, and then I started to thinking of you and Twitter. I love reading the Tweets?
Closest to the village well I can think of, bawdy too, which I like.
I am a narcissist, especially for my own poetry, but we’re (me and my other personae) comfortable with it as long as we don’t lose sight of that water well conversation. Twitter is close to good poetry of the imagist type.
Anything that gets us communicating spontaneously and especially with joy is a good thing, to me.
merc’s last post was Clear.
One of my thoughts about Twitter is that the character-limit does mean that one’s updates tend to be quippy, and therefore more like one-liners shared with friends, and therefore tending bawdy without a doubt. Or, to analogise it differently, it’s like the flash that goes off when a photo’s being taken, making everything recognisable but overbright and slightly eery.
That’s a very fine analogy.
If we sense an uneasiness, we must listen. For me every written cyber word is considered, though I enjoy reading tweets for a time, I could not write in such a way. Still, I can see the camaraderie, and perhaps what concerns you is the increase in unknown people requiring attention. I don’t know.
Enough or too much! William Blake.
merc’s last post was Clear.
If we sense an uneasiness, we must listen.
These are wise words. There are people who I might have done well to avoid a lot earlier if I hadn’t been so concerned with overriding my unease in the interests of a “fair go”. In life, perhaps, so in Twitter!
I did a little bit of moaning about the Twitter on my video for today.
One day cultural archaeologists are going to ask what the first age of the Internet was like and we can simply point them to the above sentence.
I don’t know Twitter from a bar of social Internet tools, other than for the echoes I get on this site and a few selected others. I am quite partial to a similar form, which is the status update on Facebook (not that I’ve been on Facebook for long either) and I especially like the fact that it doesn’t get archived. It is a fleeting medium that leaves no trace, and yet people write some quite splendid things.
Still, it was the staying power of Twitter that made this masterpiece of a blog post from Robyn possible. So it can’t be all bad. I’m keep thinking also that my beloved Georges Perec would have loved the thing.
In that spirit I’m going to make a bit of history and produce my first tweet, here and now:
“Saw The Lives of Others last night. Meh.”
Giovanni’s last post was 7 Grams