When being wrong feels right

This week I found myself at an Advanced Blogging Workshop run by New York City Webgrrls, a group of women working in technology who network and run classes like this. In this workshop I discovered that everything about my blog is "wrong", from using the Blogger platform to my page layout, from the erratic nature of my posts to my content which is too personal and not professional enough.

I was told that "the blogging community does not respect anonymous bloggers" which is a pretty amazing claim considering the millions of blogs that exist...did the Worldwide Bloggers Association hold a meeting and not tell me about it? I never got a chance to vote!

My initial reaction is to think, if being right is what everyone else is doing, I want to be wrong! When I conveyed these sentiments in the workshop, that being "different" could attract readers, I was told that Internet users make judgments about whether they want to read a blog in 1/20 of a second and that if I didn't have the right pieces in their proper places saying appropriate things, these valued potential readers would turn tail & run and never, ever, EVER come back. Whoosh! Millions of missed opportunities!

I don't know about you, valued readers, but this is not how I read blogs. I do wander into some blogs that are on a subject matter that is not of interest to me and leave...for example, I'm not a computer scientist and I don't have a baby so if I go on to sites that have these as their primary material, I don't stay.

But through Twitter, I am exposed to literally hundreds of blog links every day and, unfortunately for my academic work, I follow quite a few of them back to their source. It doesn't matter whether it is a blog with tips for success or a blog that describes a party someone went to, if it looks mildly interesting, I'll give it five minutes of my time and even scan through older posts. I usually notice that some layouts are more inviting than others but I read some blogs that almost qualify as ugly! But content rules!

Because I'm basically a humanist and I follow a lot of people on Twitter who work in marketing & PR, I often find myself at odds with some of the consumer/corporate ideology in the material I come across. Unless the person is offensive or dismissive, this doesn't stop me from revisiting this blog if there is another entry posted that sounds interesting. Once again, content rules over presentation, at least in my world.

So, I apologize if having the menu on the right side rather than the left side forces the reader to have to shift their glance from one side of the page to the other but you know what? I think you guys can figure it out!

I am actually going to consider some of the suggestions that were made to me because I don't want to be closed-minded to criticism. But they will be considered each on their own merits. If being popular means looking like everyone else, I'll stick with my frizzy hair and oddly-shaped toes. I mean, if it can't be personal, why even have a blog?

If no one sees you online, do you really exist?

I work in Sociology and one of the foundational ideas in the discipline is that human beings are social creatures by nature and that our communities play an enormous role in forming our personal and relational identities. Even the most anti-social individual is connected to other people through kinship, work, ethnic, religious, or cultural ties. No one is an island, I don't care if you are a hermit living in a cave on a mountain cliff, the actions of other people can affect your life.

Since this assumption about human nature and society was drilled into me during graduate school, I was a little stunned thinking about this blog entry to realize I was going to be arguing against it and for the singular importance of the individual outside of their public relationships. We DO exist outside our relations to other people and their perception of us.

This dawned on me after reading another blog (whose name unfortunately escapes me now) in which the author discussed an exchange with a reader who lamented that since he didn't appear in any photos on the Flickr website that were taken of an event, it was like he wasn't even there, like he wasn't in attendance.

I'm living part-time in an online world where self-promotion is the norm and people are actively encouraged to develop their "personal brands" for career advancement. I am brand "Liz" and I write a blog about "X, Y, and Z" and if you hire me, you can "own" a piece of me by association. The argument for this point of view towards the self is that it gives ownership over ones identity and other people perception of ones identity back to the individual...you can shape the way people perceive you by highlighting those aspects of oneself one wishes to be known for (intelligence, resourcefulness, humor, trendsetting, productivity, ability to strategize, etc.). A person actively creates, cultivates, and promotes those aspects of oneself that you're trying to sell whether for business or personal reasons.

saysI have a lot of issues with treating oneself as a commodity which I might go into in another post. But I bring it up here because it seems like this is another manifestation of "what other people see is what is real". In the 1990s, concern about the confusion between public perception with reality was mainly aimed at violence and sex in movies and television and later, the whole concept of reality shows and people living out their lives on camera. I remember in Madonna's film Truth or Dare (1991), Warren Beatty says,

She [Madonna] doesn't want to live off-camera, much less talk. There's nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it's off-camera? What point is there existing?

Now we see this online. The description of a person or event which is posted on the Internet--whether it is a blog entry, a video, a news story--is seen as authentic partially because of the speed in which the information or images can now be delivered. The person who first defines an individual or encounter, whatever link comes out highest in a Google Search, is seen as more authoritative than later analyses or commentaries with lower search engine results. Authors with lots of readers have greater influence and respect amongst members of their community and by journalists than lesser known authorities even when you read volumes of scathing comments on their blogs.

Any act or statement that can make a person more notable, leave a bigger impression, created greater fame means that this person's life and opinion is worth more....to a certain group of people in our society. It doesn't matter whether you're a famous tech blogger or William Hung, any kind of fame that distinguishes an individual from the "masses" is highly prized and sought after by many people. The kind of quiet, reflective presence, a person who creates or works out of inspiration or out of necessity in their little corner of the world...well, it is almost as if they don't exist an individual. If you Google someone's name and nothing appears, do they really exist?

Of course, this hunger for public recognition is not held by all or even the majority people in the U.S. Most people, surprise, surprise, are satisfied with their lives although they wish they had a little more free time for their family or friends, they wish they were a little thinner, and they wish they made a little more money. They don't need every significant moment in their lives recorded and posted online to know that it occurred. They can rely on their memories to remind themselves, albeit with colored lenses, what meaningful events happened in their lives. They don't mind keeping their personal and even professional lives private.

Now, I don't think one viewpoint is superior to another, they are just incompatible with each other and I think few people on either side of this divide appreciate the other side's
point of view. Part of this difference is generational and we are bound to see more online chronicling of people's lives as the U.S. population ages.

My parents don't understand why I have online friends, my older brother doesn't understand why I participate in online discussion groups and I don't understand why my younger friends post their personal photos online for public consumption. It is an escalating, growing level of public exposure of ones personal life and while I think this change is ultimately inevitable in America (although it won't happen overnight), I think that seeking online validations for ones existence, beliefs, presence gives too much weight to our visible, public image over our intrinsic sense of self-worth.

The bottom line or the big picture? There are BILLIONS of individuals living right now without an online presence, who would never show up in a Google search. They are real and I think it would behoove our future as a country not to forget that they exist in a number that far and away eclipses the number of people who blog or who have My Space or Facebook pages. They might ultimately enter the online world but we would be blind to forget that they are many, that they exist, and that they might compose a large influence in our country's and culture's future.

What would it even mean to live in a world with 6.68 billion personal brands?

Lost in the AT&T desert at Starbucks...

I don't like blog rants against companies. Each person's experience with a company is uniquely theirs...potential readers have had their own encounters with businesses, both positive or negative. Ranting doesn't solve the problem because this is just a personal blog not one of influence or a large readership.

And yet...and yet...I must write because I can't get past the experience. Because I am stuck here in the Internet netherworld at Starbucks. I am stuck in limbo.

As you might have heard, Starbucks is now offering free wi-fi in its stores. Or at least that is the hook that gets people who used to come more often to Starbucks to come back. Free wi-fi is great, as soon as my computer booted up, I was instantly connected to the AT&T network. Starbucks.com recognized me and that I was logged on. Unfortunately, AT&T didn't recognize me by any username or password combination that I have ever used online. Yes, I was online via free wi-fi but I was trapped in the desert of an AT&T log in page, a bitterly harsh, empty plane of existence with nary an oasis in site.

I tried, Lord, I tried and tried every way I could to get online for over an hour and a half. I tried going through the Starbucks.com but, as I mentioned, the website said I was already online. My username was "already in use". Well, that is partially true I was logged on but I was stuck in an online purgatory.

I tried recreating my account. Starbucks wouldn't let me use any username I tried (I can't have created multiple accounts, could I?) and when I tried to create a new account under the username "Starbuckssucks", they accepted the name but wouldn't let me register with my Starbucks card because it was registered to my original account. You can't have a card registered to two different users.

Why didn't I talk to a barista about the problem? Well, the one time I tried to do that on a previous futile effort to use the free wi-fi, the person at the cash register said, "Really, we have free wireless here? I didn't know that. When did that start?"

So, let's try the AT&T log in page, there MUST be some link there to help the poor user. But, alas, no. Clicking on "Forget your password?" or "Manage account" just leads to an empty error page. And when I tried to find a link to contact the company, I got a T-Mobile page (say what?!) offering a list of phone numbers that I where I could call the company. This is crazy! Like I, a free wi-fi user, would try to navigate through the voicemail wilderness of AT&T in order to fix a problem with the Starbucks/AT&T recognition system. That would involve more hours of my life and I doubt they would even be any help at all. How can a Starbucks customer using free wi-fi have any influence over a corporate giant that has the iPhone to worry about?

The funny thing is is that I'm a devoted Starbucks customer and have been since the late 1980s when I first visited a store in Oregon. I defended their predatory business practices and argued for the quality of their coffee over similar coffeehouses. But once they raised my expectations and I came into the store with my computer, ready to get some work done, it was maddening to spend all of this time trying one way or another to get online and end up accomplishing nothing.

So, because Starbucks promised the customer (me) something which it could not deliver, they turned an embarrassingly loyal customer into one that wants to go just about anywhere else for coffee.

I should mention that in 6 or 7 attempts, I was once (1 time) able to get on to the AT&T wireless network. Once, and never ever again. And here ends my tirade against a company offering a service which is not really available and, what is worse, having no back-up plan (trained baristas? some help on the AT&T page? troubleshooting information?) to help when things go wrong.

P.S. Posted after I got home and went online thanks to another corporate giant, Cablevision

Those who don't create, critique those who do

I've committed one of the cardinal sins of blogging: it's been weeks since I've written an entry. This has happened for a number of reasons but primarily due to my addiction to Twitter.

I've found this microblogging format and the people I've been introduced to incredibly compelling. Twitter is everything that academia and a dissertation is not: it is concise instead of wordy, it is flirty instead of measured, it is snarky instead of considered, it is timely instead of enduring, and it is fast instead of labored.

There is in both academia and the Twitter universe a great deal of self-promotion but where Twitter blares out self-referential Tweets in stark, bright colors, scholars indirectly tout themselves in lengthy and subdued footnotes. Twitter is bold, snappy and instantaneous and in academia, even after death, an author's work is ceaselessly critiqued for its worthiness and its potential contribution to the field. Bogged down in yet more dissertation rewrites, I was an easy mark to fall prey to Twitter's seductive urgency, its false sense of intimacy and its immediacy.

But since every quality that are Tweets, or messages, are aspects of writing frowned upon in my discipline, I've been a stranger in a strange land, out of my element. The people I've encountered online have been, by and large, kind and open to me but, to use another cliche, I'm a round peg in a square hole. I don't fit and many of my snarky remarks were observations of the worlds of the participants (primarily technology and marketing) that I found incredibly peculiar. I found and still find it difficult to hold my tongue when people are behaving in what seems to me to be a ludicrous manner. If I was physically present, I would roll my eyes and give a "what is WITH these people" shake of my head but since I was in the world of Twitter, I would fire off a random pet peeve of those I was "following" or remark sarcastically in a way that I thought resembled intelligence.

I was already to write another Tweet about how no one in the outside world really cares about political in-fighting in the world of technology when I got a terrible headache. Eventually, this led me to wonder, was I creating anything of value? Was I contributing to the problem instead of trying to understand the world and myself a little better?


Which, predictably, led me back to my neglected blog. I hope to take the energy I got from writing Tweets and channel it towards the creation of something more lasting and ephemeral than 140 character messages. I'm not aiming for profundity, I'd just like to contribute something relevant to the discussion going on online about how advances in technology and communication are changing the way we understand ourselves and the way we behave.

I know I won't be promoting myself on Twitter, that is a no-no that is just too ingrained in me over years of graduate school programming. But I can say with certainty that I'll probably lapse into talking about myself and my cat! That's a promise.

Internet Intervention

All that time spent surfing other people's blogs occasionally leads something really worthwhile! From Those Aren't Muskets via Cracked and YouTube:

An Internet Intervention

Show or tell?

I can't believe it but it turns out that I've spent most of the day working on this blog, fine-tuning the template so that all entries look standardized. It isn't a complete success...the font is larger in Internet Explorer than Mozilla Firefox which is the browser I always use. So it has been a lot of small adjustments on each entry, altering spacing, italics and the like. I hope no one has this blog on a feed or their probably got a hundred entries as I published and republished each entry.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. It's been fun to have a place I can go, write and experiment but I can't imagine the amount of hours someone with an active blog would need to invest in maintaining their site. Maybe they get contributors to provide them with content and the blogmaster just handles the formatting and uploading of pictures and such.

I'm trying to add some functionality to this blog (why? don't know) which has led me to some blog directories and I can't quite fathom the range of stuff that is out there on the Internet, the level of sexuality on display. Everyone from young girls to old men, mostly white folk though. And the people don't seem to be making money off of it, it's just exposure for exposure's sake. Do the individuals think that no one they know will ever see the photos? That there is something called privacy on the Internet? I have a terrible feeling that these are private photos that some ex-boyfriend decided to share with the world. But I guess the alternative--that these people want to flash their private parts--isn't much better.

Oddly enough, you see enough body parts and they start looking generic, like drawings in an anatomy book or like you're looking at farm animals. I feel curious about the people who are posing more than aroused by their bodies. The volume of what's out there is just so overwhelming that any individuality is completely erased. I guess that's why I'm a sociologist and not a pornographer. Well, one reason.

No one would ever accuse me of being an exhibitionist. That might seem odd for someone who writes down their thoughts for anyone to see but this forum seems relatively anonymous and I have yet to pass on the URL to anyone know in my real life. I think I'm afraid that I'll let their opinion (which WILL be expressed) to influence the content of the blog and right now it's free to be whatever it is....in other words, a blank page where I can reveal as little or as much as I want. In that regard, I guess I'm a verbal exhibitionist.

Embrace discomfort...sez who?

I was looking around the house for something to inspire me to write and I found a Word document I had created by cutting and pasting an article from the Internet...here is the section that grabbed me initially when I saw the article in a magazine:

Embrace discomfort—at least temporarily.
Change is hard, but perpetual dissatisfaction is no picnic either. "You won't make any real progress unless you're willing to be temporarily uncomfortable," says Robert Leahy, PhD, a clinical professor of psychology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and author of The Worry Cure. "Taking one step backward from your easy life is the first step forward." You may even learn that what you thought would be excruciating (putting your house up for sale, having a one-on-one with your boss or partner) isn't nearly as unpleasant as you thought. http://www.prevention.com/cda/article/make-this-your-year/b7f068f271903110VgnVCM10000013281eac____/weight.loss/strategies.for.success/diet.basics/0/0/1

This is so true of me--I try to avoid anxiety by delaying uncomfortable activities or decisions--but writing a simple blog entry became this early morning quest to find the authorship of this quote. I didn't identify the source on my Word document so I did a Google and Yahoo search for "embrace discomfort", looked through 250 options they listed; went on to at least a dozen quotation websites, searching for any quotes using the words "embrace" and "discomfort"; I even went to some Bible sites after thinking it might be some quote from Paul but no luck.

No one takes credit for putting these two words together but it was interesting to see who uses the expression:

1. Self-help websites
2. Yoga websites
3. Business/Motivational websites
4. Exercise/Sport websites
5. Health websites
6. Ecological websites
7. Christian websites
   

So, the expression has expanded to beyond what how I initially understood the term to now include all forms of change in ones physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual life, ones business practices or ones lifestyle. It now refers to any aspect of our life that we are seeking to change whether it is altering ones corporate culture or sales methods, changing how or where we shop, losing weight, getting in shape to run a marathon, learning to love our neighbor, pushing through the pain to achieve a yoga position, or starting to date again after a divorce.

It's fascinating to me that somewhere, at some point, some unknown minister, self-help guru, or motivational speaker put these two words together and created an entire philosophy that covers all aspects of ones personal and professional life. How does that happen? It's refreshing in this day and age that a phrase can be popularized like that without someone "branding" or trademarking it.

I never did find the source of this quote listed above until I went back to my original document and did a search for a more obscure term (the last name of one of the authors cited). It turns out that the original piece was from Prevention magazine at the beginning of the year and came from a series of articles about making changes in ones life (link included).

My search for inspiration ended up becoming a futile search for an author and it is somehow comforting to me that there are some newer expressions or sayings that we can still say were written by "Anonymous".