Social Networking

Social media? Important way to get news? Huge time waster? Essential to keep up with friends and family? Way to spew your own particular political views by sharing the real or fake news? That's my facebook profile above with a few photos it displays when you click on that.

Social media, for me, is really Facebook and Twitter. And I send tweets to Facebook. I do have a Google+ account because I use Google Apps, but I never look at it. My Instagram account has one picture (of tacos).

Yep. I never go there. So I usually only see Instagram pix (and tweets for that matter) when they are shoved to Facebook.

I don't need social media to get news. I get phone alerts from the AP, NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, etc. I take papers. And sometimes get around to reading them.  I watch the news on TV. I listen to NPR when I'm in the car. 

What I'm really looking for with social media is the passing parade of people being people. Getting sick, getting well, not getting well, having children, sending those kids off to college, traveling. It is fascinating to see what a theater critic in California is saying or the high school classmate who lives in Las Vegas or San Jose. Getting travel pictures from the couple who is older than us and travels to exotic places. It is instructive to hear about moves, new jobs, retirements, hobbies. I like seeing what movies and shows people are seeing. I find their snarky political swipes instructive (of who they are and what they are feeling) even as I zoom past them. And I love seeing the pictures people post of their meals and drinks. 

I try to add something to the mix that might be a little different. I share stories (from real news outlets) that are not what we read every day. I take walks and post random photos along with the path drawn on a map. I do take pictures of my drinks (especially the Manhattans) and attractive food. I occasionally ask for advice from the hive mind.

Yes, I probably waste too much time on these feeds when I could be accomplishing something. But it's really all about how you use it. And I don't think I followed any links to stories pimped by Russians. And one can waste time in so many ways these days. Sometimes I look at social media, watch TV and try to read the papers all at once. It doesn't really work, of course. 

Blogging (well, WEB journals) were sort of the original social media. Or newsgroups. Whatever. You'd blog and comment on blogs. You kept up with people all over the world.

Here is one thing that does bug me about social media. We go to an event and we are having a conversation and someone starts talking about the things we have done and posted. Then they admit that they never post anything themselves. Is there any way to get them to shut up telling you what you have done? ("You take all these long walks." "You were in Dallas.") Could they at least talk about what they've been doing when you meet in person since they (think) they already know all about your life?

Social, Media and Social Media

Seven years ago I had been in a protracted period of fighting my Dad's health and maintenance problems. I posted some tweets (which got sent to Facebook) and today they are in a stream on Facebook called 'On This Day.' So seven years ago I was dealing with lots of issues that, I guess, I can now look forward to in my own future. (Unless I get the bus hits me, instantly killed, death. One never knows.)

Social media keeps us informed of the drumbeat of normal folks. There are friends and acquaintances who end up in the emergency room or having surgery or suffering at home. I'd never know about it but for social media. People create art and plays and music and pictures and snippets there on social media are all I ever know of it. There are lots of real stories there, too, Links to genuine news media. And links to junk and lies. I skip most of it. (Yes, Carrie Fisher is dead. Her mom, Debbie Reynolds, too. No, I don't think that there is a war or Christmas or cops.) I read three newspapers and dispatches online from a couple more. I read The New Yorker. These publications employ fact checkers. 

But I'll keep reading social media. Because I want to know if you are sick or hurting, lost a loved one or are just enjoying life by eating, drinking, going to shows or movies, and visiting with family. It is a pulse for my family, friends and acquaintances. The other day I realized how much some people rely on my feed for a pulse of what I'm doing. I got an email from someone asking if we were all right. Because I hadn't posted in a day or two. 

I hope social media keeps going as a through line to people's real lives. But I hope we rely on real media produced by journalists to give us news.

Hat For Every Head

I've been goofing off, reading in my easy chair and pretending to care about football, and in the back of my mind trying to think what to write in this space for the 29th day of Holidailies.

We got two holiday cards today. One from someone who is the child of college friends of mine who sends pictures of her husband and young child and who lives maybe five miles away. Another from a proud grandfather, mailed from Seattle where he's helping with his daughter's new twins, a continent away from his own home. I hadn't sent either a card. I will now, though, to complete the loop. (Besides I have a box full still unused.)

Earlier I was sifting through social media, thinking about people and their posts of children and snow and their comments about things received and places visited and new babies.

And I decided to say: any kind of communication works for me. Whatever the frequency or form. It's good to reach out.

I've had two Manhattans and I really have nothing else to say except keep writing and talking and blogging and tweeting, snapping pictures and sending missives far and wide. Emails, snail mails, blasts to all your 'friends.' Whatever. Just keep talking.

We have to keep up the chatter.

[Photo taken at a wonderful hat store, a venerable brand but new to Austin.]

I'm easily entertained...

...but also easily bored.

In the presence of words (almost any book, magazine or newspaper will do but spare me the Sports section with no news of tennis and Romance novels) I am almost always be entertained. I may be distracted by something else and lose track of the reading, but I won't be bored. I read the program at concerts and events before they begin (assuming I haven't taken a magazine). I read ads. Pictures are nice, too.

Give me a keyboard and the right mood and I can type until the cows come home. My dad used to whistle for them to do that on the old 60-odd acre home place at about dusk. But I could type on until midnight. I may not say a thing but I will produce a stream of letters formed into English words but the sentences may make sense, alone or together. I will even invent initialisms like HQWF (How Quickly We Forget). Even though I hate them. Laugh out loud! Not going to abbreviate it.

I can people watch endlessly, browse the WEB and, even, read old online and handwritten journals by yours truly for hours on end.

Unless I get distracted.

I am easily bored in some ways. Playing tennis the other day with someone who never runs after an errant ball and who strolls into position to receive, back turned, holding up her hand and saying 'wait a minute' strains me. So I start observing things and entertaining myself. Noticing how the uniforms (all red outfits, all white visors) on some players down the way look, wondering what weeds have opportunistically poked through the cracks in the awful court we are using, considering the resemblance of the Lacrosse player practicing on the half court behind us to a send-up painting of a kid with a backwards cap on the cover of The New Yorker a few years back on the anniversary issue. (Supposed to be a Gen X version of Eustace Tilly he was.) And so it goes until I get a chance to touch ball to strings. Or to serve. I like serving because I get to hit more balls. Two aces Tuesday. I don't hit hard but I move it around. I've been writing a poem in my head about math, tennis and boredom. I work on it sometimes while I'm bored at tennis.

Fractal branches cast fractal shadows against the order of the lines.
Perpendicular lines and partial lines carving the court into rectangles.
Spaces of in and out and fault and ace. Rules about touching and missing.
Why twenty-seven feet? Or twenty-one? A three-foot net at the middle.
I see a pattern and yet not. Only one prime in sight. But I digress, interrupted
By caroms in three space, arcs predictable except for spin and striking
Nails in the tape to hold the lines to the clay surface. How far apart?
How distracted and yet focused the math makes the tennis and the ennui.

No, that isn't the poem. It's just random lines I constructed just now to illustrate.

I have been writing a short story in my head (although it might be a novel or a novella or a part of a novel) for a long while about a guy hitting tennis balls on the very court where I played Tuesday so I thought about that when things were going. too. slowly. I like how some online writers invented the technique of adding extra periods to slow you down as you read. The story has a bicycle rider and an SUV and so when I see a bike go by and then an SUV I visualize what the protagonist (a guy from Odessa, Texas, I'm not sure why) sees through the fence and wind screen.

Yeah, I'm easily bored and yet, sometimes, when I flip from running my iMac as an Apple to the window running XP under VMware and it has gone into a screen saver mode and is showing my own picture collection to me I just sit there, watching pictures I've already seen over and over for a few minutes. But in front of the TV with the satellite hookup and a DVR with captured episodes of this and that I can be so completely bored and unable to be engaged that I have to get up and get something to read.

I watch a lot of TV and movies at home. And sometimes they are pretty exciting and encompassing. But I get bored if I JUST watch them. And not just because of commercials which we usually skip anyway. I almost always read as well. Newspapers usually. So I'll be reading about Somalian pirates, Taliban areas of Pakistan, Obama's dog, Broadway revivals of "Hair" and "West Side Story", whatever, and sort of watching with one eye and listening. Makes sub-titled movies (which I love especially if they are French although German is sort of amusing, too) hard to follow. I also like to work puzzles while watching TV. I will learn a new word in a crossword (e.g.: marten; toque meaning a woman's hat instead of a chef's tall one) and not be able to contain myself until I look the word up in a real or online dictionary.

There is infinite entertainment in this apartment and yet I get stir-crazy to leave it now and then. Then when I'm out I get eager to come back and settle down with my computer, newspapers, books.

I stay engaged with movies, in a dark theater, although I like to have some food and I hate the food except for the Alamo where drinking beer and eating fried things and actually watching the movie keeps me there. Unless my mind wanders.

This restlessness, dare I say bordering on attention-deficit, makes me anxious. So, I guess I go from being entertained by many things to boredom to anxiety, all in the space of minutes.

When I was in school or at work in meetings with presentations by others, I had to write something to stay focused. It might be about what was being presented. It might be a 'to do' list or a grocery list or a doodle. It might be an idea only peripherally about the content the lecturer was presenting. One such segue produced an idea which is one of the few ideas that both received a patent for some of us at the company and actually made a bit of money in the marketplace.

I see people who are really focused on something. Maybe it is a very BIG thing like running a company or non-profit or a tiny thing like a very focused hobby or sport. Nothing gets my attention like that. I'm used to starting on things and never following up. Blogging and posting pictures online is something I've been pretty faithful doing (if that's the proper word) but, let's be honest, the form is constantly changing. And it isn't a thing you finish. It's the equivalent of notebooks full of non sequitur musings created during lectures and other entertainments that did not fully engage my dilettante mind.

Lately I've been watching people who focus closely on something, shutting out distraction. They are creating businesses, fighting for causes, writing books and plays. That will never be me, I guess. And my accomplishments will always be brief breakthroughs: an idea, a sentence, a paragraph, the short essay, the clever bon mot. The other day on twitter I said:

viswoman found blogging reduced her writing to a few paragraphs. Twitter to 140 characters. New service: Heartbeat. Nine letters or less.

I thought I was so clever. Heartbeat. In some techie worlds it is a notice that some process or service is there, working, alive if you will. And the word has nine letters. And yet when I tried to label this post, selecting from labels used on some of the prior 638 posts, I ended up with more than two hundred characters which, apparently, is the blogger limit.

Feature Creature

Chip at Holidailies brings us today's writing prompt: "The one thing I want for Holidailies 2009 ...." I'm not really going to write about that. Rather I'm going to write about the danger of adding features. Or worse sometimes 'improving' them.

Holidailies is a portal that has code to present a changing view of a group of blogs as people register entries. Or, in the case of Holidailies at Home it is a list of blogs and a randomizer to scan through them. When Holidailies started it is unlikely that the participants were called blogs. But I digress. Chip has created a simple interface. You go there and there is a list of participants on the left, ordered by the number of entries they have made, descending. In the center is a list of entries registered with recent ones at the top. Along the right side is news, info, writing prompts and links to other info, contact and to login (when you do there's a link to post an entry). It's simple and anyone who comes here can set off on a blogland journey knowing they can find some new content.

You could make up new ways that this could work all day long. You could ask that the code automatically find your blog and see that it is updated. Our Austin, Texas daily photo participates in a portal like that (City Daily Photo). While it's nice not to have to post to the portal, posting gives you control over the blog entry presented and when it appears as well as letting you select an excerpt.

You could ask that the code grab picture or allow people to link to pictures and have them show on the portal. But this would interfere with the simplicity of the site and its celebration of words, words as a gift.

You could ask to be able to search the list or order it in different ways. (Fact is, Chip had some ordering options and they gave him trouble with his tools so he wisely simply ditched them.) But ordering by number of posts puts the real Holidailies hot shots near the top and a find on your browser takes care of the rest.

You could ask a lot of things, but be careful if you do. Because change and 'improvement' can slay efficiency and simpliciity.

Since I participate in another portal to blogs as I mentioned, City Daily Photo, I'll mention a bit about how it works. On that blog you don't have to post an entry. The code scans the sites and notes new entries, extracting the one picture (you are only supposed to put up one but really it will get the first in an entry). These can be displayed in the (reverse) order of update. It takes thirty minutes or so for your site to be noted in a regular scan. You can also choose favorites. This portal has been through lots of code changes and hiccups, but its coders have done an equally good job. While the portal behaves very differently it's appropriate to its mission and not too confusing. (That has improved over time.)

Things that are 'coded' are just static because we don't rewrite some lines and replace and integrate. It is so easy to change (not really always, but still) that the tendency is to change the code. Sometimes there are bugs. Sometimes they are very annoying. These things need to be fixed. But whenever we touch code we think we need to improve it. We especially think we need to add features. And sometimes those new features are very cool and useful. But sometimes they just get in the way. And even if a new interface is more 'intuitive' (in someone's opinion), it may be very unintuitive to someone who is used to the old and has the old interface pounded into muscle and visual memory. (We look for things where we expect them and push keys without thinking.) Moving things around is like getting in your car and finding that the controls work differently. Maybe reverse is up instead of down. (My car is a standard shift.) Whether that is better is one thing. Changing in mid-stream is hard.

Another interface I've used lately is Facebook. I keep being drawn in there because a lot of friends are there. They say it is a 'social networking site.' But really it's a portal, too, in the same sense as these others. But the thing seems jumbled to me and I have trouble figuring out what I'm doing. I like seeing things change as people put up statuses, but I think I prefer my dull blogs, completely under my control, which are then registered with portals in a rigorous way. I want to simplify my life, even in cyberspace.

[Today's photo is a reflection in the as-yet-unfinished chocolate shop on Second Street which has, obviously, a mirror inside.]