Tag Archives: social media

Just stop and look at the jellyfish: On the instinct for broadcasting your life online

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i_awaitFrom the Millions yesterday, Emily St. John Mandel writes about Mary MacLane, a lonely, would-be socialite from Montana whose 1902 book “I Await the Devil’s Coming” presaged the more narcissistic parts of the social media era. She points out that what makes MacLane’s self-obsessed writing particularly fascinating is her apparent self-awareness:

[S]he was extremely self-aware, and there are moments when she seems to recognize the corrosive potential of her self-absorption: “If I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness,” she wrote, “my mind would produce beautiful, wonderful logic. I am a genius — a genius — a genius.” It’s a startlingly candid admission: If I weren’t so engrossed with myself, I could accomplish greater things.

I don’t know about you, but who hasn’t had that feeling every time they log on to Twitter or Facebook. Maybe not the feeling that it’s self-obsession driving you to spend your time with fleeting updates, but a sense that if you just stopped to enjoy a moment with your own eyes instead of futzing with your iPhone you might take away something more meaningful.

jellyfishWhen I upgraded my iPhone last year, I gave Carter my old one. It’s deactivated; he can’t make calls or send texts, but he can still use it for games, music, etc. We were off for spring break this week, and went to Shedd Aquarium Thursday. He brought the phone with him, stopping every few feet to take a blurry picture of every single fish in every single tank. At one point I told him to put it away. “Just stop and look at the jellyfish with your own eyes.” He argued with me. I sounded like a nag, as I probably do in this post. It’s just that sometimes all the photos and updates make me tired, and I hope he gets a sense of where to draw the line.

Mandel summed up the way I feel about the whole business in her essay:

I’ve been a sporadic and somewhat ambivalent participant of late. Long periods of time go by when I post almost nothing of my own and only respond to other people’s updates, because what it comes down to, I think, is that either you have an instinct for broadcasting your life on the Internet, or you don’t. It’s not that I find my life uninteresting, it’s just that I’m not at all sure why anyone else would be interested, aside from my mom. I keep a sporadic diary, because I want to remember my life, but I have a hard time imagining why I’d want to display that life for public consumption. I deeply value my privacy.

The privacy bit may be a little hypocritical for me. The longer I’ve been online the more I’ve drawn inward, but I lean more toward the “why anyone else would be interested” part. And this is probably not the best thing to admit now that I make a living in social media,and gear up to go back to work after a week off.

Toward a Theory of Quitting Stuff on the Internet

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Scott Smith has some thoughts about why he stopped posting to Tumblr:

With a presence on various platforms – here, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr – I’ve been wondering how to balance them all without publishing the same stuff in every space. In particular, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to get myself to blog more. If you’re a writer, you tend to write because you have something in you that needs to be expressed. And writing it – as opposed to putting it in a song or delivering a monologue – is the best way to express it.

I’ve always marveled at people with the ability to populate 3, 4, 5 different social networks consistently (Scott being one of them), because I’ve never been able to do it myself. I can barely sustain a Twitter account on most days. One of the reasons I wanted to try blogging here again was that I figured if I’m going to have the energy to write anything else I might as well do it here, the one place on the internet I’ve managed to keep running all these years. Like Scott says, I might as well do it in a place I control:

It just became too important to me to own as much of the work I was doing online as possible. I’ll still post regularly on Twitter because what it gives me is as great as what I feel I’m giving to it. Tumblr stopped delivering on its end of that bargain so I found another way to keep writing.

I’ve tried using Tumblr half a dozen times, and I think it’s fun and extremely easy to use. If I were starting a brand new blog I’d probably use it, but I always struggled with the problem of what I’d actually do there. Share links and photos? Isn’t that what Twitter is for? Write essays? Isn’t that what my blog is for? I couldn’t ever find a place for it, and a big reason is because I had this blog, which for better or worse, is the place where people can find me.

Starting out on a new network and building a following always felt like too much work. Worse, it felt like I was cheating on this place, not to mention feeling like I had nothing new to say. Maybe it’s a matter of precedent. I started writing online (or anywhere really) on this blog, and that set my expectations for how to *be* online. Maybe Tumblr is the baseline for the youngs now and blogging on WordPress feels weird. Whatever tools you use for expressing yourself online, you need to have a plan to make it worthwhile. And part of that plan is knowing when to pull the plug.

PS: I started to write this as a comment on Scott’s blog and then I was all, “Screw that man, let’s do this old school trackback style” and responded to him here. Blogging!

Where is your online home?

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Consider this a follow up to my post about personal blogging. I had an idea today for a new side project, a blog where I’d like to write about something that doesn’t really fit in here. When I was thinking about how to set it up, I had to stop and consider if I wanted to make a standalone blog at all because there is a social network that already fits all my needs. I wouldn’t have to bother with settings, templates, and boilerplate copy, and I’d have a built-in audience as soon as I connected to a few of my friends. I haven’t decided if I want to do it yet, but if I do I’m going to build out my own site, mainly because I don’t like using the other site that could fill this niche. But the interesting thing to me was that I had this conversation with myself at all.

Anyone who spends a lot of time online has an idea of their online “home,” the place where they spend the most time, participate in a community, post the most stuff, etc. For most people these days I suspect it’s Facebook, but it could be as simple as an email account or a portal site like Yahoo. For the longest time I thought of this site as my home, because if anyone wanted find out about what’s going on with my life, they could find it here. Anything else I did online like Flickr or delicious was an adjunct account to augment the blog. This was the starting point. But now after over three years on Twitter, it’s the first place I’d tell people to find me online. I think it just has to do with frequency; I’m on Twitter all the time, posting my own stuff and replying to other people. As I said before, it’s taken up a lot of what I used to do here. It takes up the primary mental space, everything else I do online flows through there somehow. This site, on the other hand, has taken a backseat to serve a more specialized purpose. Instead of being the all-purpose Matt Wood clearinghouse (and we know the world needs that), it’s now the place where I write longer stuff because that’s what suits this particular tool best.

Scott Rosenberg commented on my post about personal blogging that blogs may seem to be in decline because we simply have more tools to choose from for doing our thing online. What we used to think of a blogs are more heavyweight, and social networking sites pick up a lot of the rest. The reverse chronological blogging format has also become so tightly incorporated into the rest of the web that you could argue that most sites are really blogs, or have very blog-like elements, at their cores. You’d be hard pressed to find a news site or social network that doesn’t use that format in some shape or form. So maybe what I was talking about in that last post is that blogs have shifted from being the focal point of our online lives to having a more specialized purpose. They’re still important, but they’re no longer home.

So yeah, Tumblr

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Long-time Wood-Tang followers know that I make a habit of saying I’m going to quit blogging and close up shop, only to return a few weeks later with some sheepish excuse about why I really need it. I got to the point where I don’t even believe myself when I start thinking such things, and I taught myself to hold off on making such declarations any more. But I did want to point out that I’m using Tumblr again, mainly because it’s so damn fun.

I tried hard over the past couple months to turn this site into one of those Andrew Sullivan/Jason Kottke-style, quick hit, link-heavy blogs that I’ve always wanted to run, but the thing is, doing that with a standard blog platform like WordPress is a real pain in the ass and hard to manage when it isn’t your full-time job (see examples above). I really wish I could keep everything I do online in one place, but the ease with which you can toss off a link, quotation, picture, etc into Tumblr without breaking stride is just too much to resist. And while I’ve cured myself of the nasty habit of regurgitating every word Merlin Mann types, he hit it on the head with Tumblr:

I came to Tumblr because I wanted to revive a beloved and long-mothballed blog. And that choice became, as they say, a non-brainer once I saw the Tumblr bookmarklet. It’s one of the smartest and most friction-free bits of computer functionality it’s ever been my pleasure to use. Punto.

Now widely aped to varying success, Tumblr’s contextual bookmarklet has changed the way I use the web. It’s partly why I now recommend Tumblr to anyone who doesn’t want the burden of a “real blog,” but who’s also interested in giving the internet something more substantial than a one-hundred-character complaint about their meal and the person who served it — people who have that itch to share lovely bits of the world that come over their transom throughout the day without stopping the other things they’re working on.

So, as the kids say, fuck yeah Tumblr. If you’re interested in links, contextless photos, and Sesame Street hip-hop videos, check it out. I’m not sure what this means for how I balance what I write here vs what I post there. I suspect it will just be a matter of word count. If it’s something simple that I just want to post without much elaboration, I’ll put it on Tumblr. And if I find myself forming an actual strong opinion over multiple paragraphs, I’ll post it here. No promises, I may stop and start and let either of these places lay fallow at any given time. But at least I won’t announce it again.