If you need something in your ears for an hour, us geezers pontificated last week. It was fun. There are a few people I quoted without attribution and I need to go find those sources of inspiration. I think Patti Digh pointed to someone who wrote about un-developing. That’s the one I want to find. I hope I was not too cynical…
Nancy White: Life Online
Here comes a wander. Be warned.
There are some bulbs along our driveway that were here when we bought our house in 1984. In the Spring, they put up a bunch of large green, strappy leaves which dry and fade away as the Summer heat comes on. Then, come Autumn, large pink crocus-like flowers emerge. The surprise was delightful the first time and still is, 30-some years later. (Turns out they are probably Giant Colchicum – Autumn Crocus).
So blogging… I’m not sure if it is because I’m paying attention differently, or if there is something emerging around personal blogging like the crocus. It is alive all year long. It sends up shoots in the Spring then disappears again, and then it flowers. Is a new cycle starting? People whose blogs I used to read consistently but who have faded out over the years are blogging again. There is crosslinking around the topic at hand. Look who is blogging again!! I’m so delighted. (AND: I need a better feedreader, email subscriptions are not as useful, help!)
Blogging is different than participating in social media for me. But it takes more time and attention. It is quieter for the most part. Sometimes solitary. Sometimes it connects. Sometimes it needs the permanency of a url so it can sit, and later, even much later, the flowers can emerge. It is NOT feed of the moment for me.
I wrote yesterday about my Blogiversary. One of the observations was the power of thinking out loud in a blog post and the tantalizing possibility that others may chime in, counter, improve or simply show they were “there” in a comment. As Chris Corrigan noted, the satisfaction is NOT like the (addictive, distracting, destructive) “likes” or “retweets” of FB, Instagram and Twitter. I feel something visceral in this. Cellular versus a visual stimulation that comes and goes in an instant.
Dave Pollard wonders out loud about the role of relationship in our blogging. About how relationships do or do not inform our sense of identity. Euan Semple riffs on the relationship and self knowing. ( I find Euan’s post today on non-identifying usefully troublesome and need to think about what is surfacing for me, about the down side of non-identifying when one is from a dominant culture, race, gender etc. Claiming non-identification can also be an abdication of the negative impact of privilege but that is another topic for pondering.)
What we all have in common is that we wonder out loud in our blogs.
P.S. If you don’t blog, and are INTERESTED, check out these suggestions from Chris.
May 1st, 2004 was the first post to this iteration of my blog. 18 years of writing blog posts in one place. The previous blog waffled, wandered and the digital artifacts are for the most part, lost. But even those four years were instrumental to my discovery and learning. (I used the first blog mostly to curate resources for clients!)
In 2017, my dear friend Lilia Efimova reflected on her blogging history. She is, happily for me, still blogging, as is Ton Zylstra, whose post triggered Lilia’s. Those two were pioneers for me, and their writing still inspires and teaches me. (The list of other people whose blogs were/are still dear to me should be added to this post. Someday, right?)
Ton’s post on 15 Years of Blogging made me realise that I had reached similar milestone last June. In this post I look into “more blogging, less FB” issues and outline several points to work on.
Lilia Efimova
Source: 15 years of blogging, FB and what’s next — Mathemagenic
Lilia reflected back then on the wider range of places we can write, share, post, connect and most directly reflected on the borg that is Facebook. The proliferation of other socially-oriented platforms definitely had an impact on blogging in general, and directly for me.
Ton wrote:
When I started blogging it was the source of a tremendous proliferation of new connections, a whole new peer network emerged practically overnight. Distributed conversations became face to face meetings and brought us to places like the Blogtalk and Reboot conferences. Many of the people I regard as a major source of learning, inspiration I met because of this blog. Many over time have become dear friends. That alone is enough to keep blogging.
Ton Zylstra
Back in the day blogging was so many things. It created an online identity, connected me with people who have been essential in my life and formation. It triggered F2F things like Blogging conferences (Northern Voice! BlogHer!)
For me blogging is still primarily a place to think out loud together. Since fewer people blog/read blog posts/comment, the level of connection has shrunk. There has been no group F2F for years. But the last four months of regular blogging have reenergized some of those connections. And reaffirmed the value of thinking out loud together. Thank you for reading… and happy Blogiversary to me!
Jonathan Franzen wrote in a NYTimes piece back in January of this year something that keeps haunting me. This quote may be beyond what is appropriate – and yet, go read the whole thing.
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
via Technology Provides an Alternative to Love. – NYTimes.com.
Death has continued to show up in our online interactions. It still seems prudent to consider how you not only manage your social media and online information while you are alive, but what happens to it after you die. Well, maybe all that free storage will disappear and this will only be an issue for those who host their own domain, and I suspect when payments stop, things will disappear. Maybe having our ephemera evaporate is a good thing… What do you think? Since the Forbes article linked below came out in 2013, I have had to manage the social media of my Mom, who passed away four + years ago. I realized I had a very mixed relationship with her social media. I saw all her emails, what kind of junk email she was targeted with, what ads Facebook served to her. I saw she did not know how to unsubscribe or block things that were irrelevant to her. I also saw how important social media was to a woman alone in her 80’s.
It reminded me of when my Dad died in 2010 and I would read his emails and feel both more loss, and feel closer. I got to read about his old-timey music community, see the last remnants of his and my mom’s RV and Miata adventure days. It took me about 2 years to stop reading and to unsubscribe and eventually let his account go. While cleaning the basement after a flood in January, I found his hard drives which I had held on to. They finally went to e-cycling a couple of weeks ago. I never looked at the content.
Mom’s Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook accounts are still active and I have all the passwords and permissions. I’ve turned off all alerts and don’t look very often. A couple of weeks ago I thought I was ready to delete the accounts, but I just couldn’t do it. What if one of her old friends didn’t know she had died and tried to get in touch?
Managing the social media of loved ones after death is not just a technical, mechanical set of practices. It is part of how we mourn and grieve these days, how we hold on or let go.
A question that used to come up when I facilitated many online communities was how to handle the death of a member. There are many layers to this which we struggled to navigate back in the good old early days of online communities. Since then, people have come up with many useful and thoughtful approaches. Now Google stands ready to help you with all your Google accounts — not to manage the human side, but how to deal with our digital detritus. Very interesting!
Will You Use Google’s Death Manager To Let Loved Ones Read Your Email When You Die? – Forbes.