With a New Year comes renewed resolutions, and I’m again attempting to tackle my digital diet, so I’m looking at my usage of social networks. I am a heavy user of both Twitter and Facebook, but I use them in different ways – which I suspect many do. Facebook is much more for closer family and friends, whilst Twitter is more of a public broadcasting system.
Another difference occurred to me the other day though; Twitter is a feed that I curate, but Facebook is a place I curate.
Specifically, with Facebook I feel it is my duty to deal with and moderate comments on material on my timeline; with Twitter this is not an issue.
When I publish something on Twitter, people can reply, but I do not feel responsible for what they say – my only responsibility is to my feed, what I publish, say, etc. A Twitter reply is not ‘on my timeline’, it is someone else’s. With Facebook, however, people can reply to items on my timeline, and the commentary becomes a part of my timeline and so I have felt the need to moderate such activity. If someone were to say something that might be offensive to someone else, or may be particularly controversial, I feel a responsibility to deal with that, as it is happening on ‘my space’ (no pun intended). It doesn’t happen very often, but I have occasionally had to delete items by others for fear they might offend – or that it might (or has) trigger an argument or debate that I don’t want happening on my timeline. Often this is down to the ambiguity and vagueness that text alone offers – one mans pithy comment is another mans red-rag to a bull.
Even though these comments are clearly someone else’s, and not my own, the fact that they occur on my Facebook timeline makes me feel as though I should moderate. This is an odd difference between the two virtual spaces, with Twitter because tweets do not have comments but ‘replies’ I do not feel this burden. This is one difference which has made me lean much more towards Twitter use in recent times, there is none of this overhead. Paradoxically it is exactly this engagement – the opportunities for debate, collaboration, conversation, that Facebook offers that attracts me to the platform. The pay off is that I feel it is my duty to monitor and moderate that space, where necessary.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas has a nice definition for dirt, saying it is “matter out of place.” A fried egg on the plate is fine, but a fried egg all over my hands is dirty. Hyde continues to say that dirt is always a byproduct of creating order: to create a place for things means that there will be situations where things will be out of place.
(Speaking of Louis CK, he made and sold a very funny comedy special, and he gave away most of the money it earned him. Read about it here, its inspiring stuff. And it’s a great show)
The reclusive leader made the remark after South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun asked that South Korean companies operating at an industrial park in the North Korean city of Kaesong be allowed to use the Internet, Yonhap news agency reported, without citing any source.
and in discussing the issue, seemed to suggest the influence of classic city-building game Sim City in making his decisions
“I’m an Internet expert too. It’s all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired,” Kim told Roh, according to Yonhap.
Which might explain a lot about the impoverished nation – everyone knows you put the industrial zones as far away from the residential zones as possible. Sadly, he probably also learned he could bulldoze protests out of existence too.
A few months ago I got a text from a friend asking “What does ‘Namu Amida Butsu’ mean?”. I wondered why he was asking this. Then, out of no where, it occurred to me that it was the day of the one-year anniversary of his wedding. Then it made sense. I most likely wrote it in that little book people pass around at weddings and he was reading over it. So, I explained what it meant, and why I wrote it, and he replied “Thanks for that!”.
And what does it mean? Well, you can ask Wikipedia, but I suggest first, you listen to the wise words of the late, great Robert Anton Wilson
The level of hostility, snideness and general nastiness that is seen in internet comment sections is nothing new, but its only really seemed to bother me lately. It has seemed increasingly like the overall majority of comments on general news and opinion sites are of the sneering variety. Posts about religion,for instance, are invariably treated to immediate reactionary shots deriding anyone who might follow one, or a story about the Occupy movement typically is subject to comments about smelly hippies “getting a job”. I’ve taken to not bothering to read comments sections any more – as there is rarely anything of worth in there. This is not to say that I want to see a chorus of people agreeing with the post (that wouldn’t be of much use) – comments sections offer a forum for constructive debate or further illumination on the points raise or counter-points – but I don’t need to see the ubiquitous quips and one-liners that have become the norm for such places. It has got me down to some degree. I look at these comments and I dispair – Is this what the public thinks? Is this the majority viewpoint?
However, today I read a piece by John Nicholson on Football365 that made me think. In discussing the trend for minority opinions to be read or treated as the thoughts of the masses he wrote:
Look at the Guardian’s website. Massively popular, with articles read by hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people, yet look at the number of comments they attract. Regularly under a 100 made by a recurring cast of people. Even the global warming nutter vs nutter debates only attract 1500 or so. So almost no-one who reads the articles comments on them.
I realised this is true. Most web sites which would attract moderate or large readerships don’t really have huge amounts of comments relative to readership. The majority of people simply don’t comment. I thought about this a bit more; why is it that the comments sections seem to be overwhelmingly reactionary or abusive? Probably because the type of people who are reactionary or abusive simply have to have their say. The rest of us simply agree or disagree and don’t feel the need to wade in. The sneery, snide types must have their opinion heard. Others? Less so.
Of course, there is a lot to be said about how the medium itself makes it easier for people to broadcast more abusive messages – by placing the discourse behind digital screens it dehumanizes it, but this piece made me think about the numbers. That for every person who read an article only a minority chose to comment, and their motivation for commenting is possibly in alignment with their attitude.
So, the other day I posted about how you are the eternal energy of the universe, and how you came out of the world and all that.
Then on the NASA tumblr I find this, in which I saw the following:
God is a kind of cosmic baby, or a galactic Raymond Briggs character. (and of course you are also God, who is the Universe, which is you….). Either way, Mr. Kubrick wasn’t far off the mark.
In 2001, Drake began his acting career, playing the role of Jimmy Brooks, a character on Degrassi: The Next Generation.
…
Drake is mentioned in the 2010 television movie Degrassi Takes Manhattan, making him one of two Degrassi actors (along with Shenae Grimes) who exist within the series’ fictional universe independently of their characters.
I have a very strange enthusiasm for odd little facts I come across on Wikipedia. I think its the way they are so earnestly worded. And the fact that someone knew that fact, and added it to Wikipedia.
Readers of this blog will know I take an interest in curious Japanese phrases that we don’t have in English or are difficult to translate. I’ve previously talked about yūgen and wabi-sabi.
I was invited as a guest of this group to present what it is that I do to them. In this case, the fact that people were sitting on chairs was shoganai as we say in Japan. It can’t be helped. It’s just the way things are. What can ya do? Shoganai is a very useful and utterly untranslatable phrase.
A Wikipedia search for shoganai links to a page on ‘Shikata ga nai’, of which shoganai is an alternative.
Shikata ga nai (仕方がない?), pronounced [ɕi̥kata ɡa nai], is a Japanese language phrase meaning “it can’t be helped” or “nothing can be done about it”. Shō ga nai (しょうがない?), pronounced [ɕoː ɡa nai] is an alternative.
literally, there is no way of doing, or nothing can be done. Shoganai is the equivalent of c’est la vie, but with an important difference: where c’est la vie and its foreign variants focus on external circumstances, shoganai focuses on the inability of the actor to change those circumstances.
It makes me think of, and gives me an excuse to repost, this quote from Shunryu Suzuki
One day Suzuki Roshi said, “Life is basically impossible.” Then he got up and left the zendo. The next day a student asked, “Suzuki Roshi, yesterday you said that life is basically impossible. What are we going to do?”
Steve Jobs passed away last night. Don’t really need to add much to the stuff that has been, and will be written about him, suffice to say he made great things that I like to use.
Apple Computers famously reside at 1 Infinite Loop, in Cupertino, California. This morning whilst Twitter became a stream of tributes to Steve, one random, totally unrelated post caught my eye. It was from an account that Tweets posts to a Processing help forum. Someone was innocently asking a programming query, and unexpectedly created a small, strange, fitting moment.
Which, the more I think about it, is actually much more than a simple accidental pun about where Apple Computers is.
I hope we all get to gracefully exit the infinite loops.
A friend who lectures asked on Twitter for advice for first year Creative Media students. Having myself once been a first year Creative Media student I thought about what I would have liked to have heard, and I immediately thought of this Ira Glass quote I saw online a while ago.
This articulated something which had bugged me for years. When I started making creative things something just didn’t feel right. Much of it when completed didn’t please me, but I found it hard to understand why. It can be very frustrating, and you want to give up, but its that very perception that you know something isn’t right that is evidence you have taste, and if you have taste, and you work hard – you can eventually make satisfying work. Being aware of that gap is vital.
It reminds me of advice you get when you start meditating. In meditation we try to rest our attention on our breath, and to keep it there. Naturally thoughts will arise, but the trick is to notice when they appear, and not get carried away by them. We use two tools here – mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness is the ability to focus the attention on the breath – and awareness is the technique by which we realise thoughts are arising or that we are lost in them. It was reassuring to learn that recognizing that you had stopped being mindful of the breath and had been lost in thoughts was important, because it meant you were aware of the situation. Without recognising that, you would simply sit there thinking away and missing the point.
It is the same with creative work. If you were not frustrated by your early work – if you were not dissatisfied, then, quite possibly it is because you are not aware that it is not living up to your standards (alternatively, you might be making brilliant work from the get go – well done you!). Maybe you have no standards, if not you will continue to make poor work. But if you notice that gap – that means you have taste and you are aware of your shortcomings, and this will help you later. But you have to do lots of work. Similarly, in meditation, if you notice time and time again you are drifting into thought this too is important and helpful, but you need to then put in the hours on the cushion and develop the ability to stay with the breath.
