To blog or not to blog
First: I am working on getting rid of my internet addiction.
Since 1995, when I first got online at a public library in Roskilde, I have been hooked. Not just to the internet, but to computing in general. Games. Social interaction. I started blogging in 1999, on livejournal, stopped, started again elsewhere, stopped, and in 2004 started again, on this DLTQ platform. 2004 was also the year I discovered videoblogging. Since then I have made hundreds of blog entries and published hundreds of videos. I helped organize VlogEurope 2005 in Amsterdam and 2007 in Heidelberg, and will also co-organize VE 2008 in Budapest (October 18th-19th).
I have read thousands of blog entries. I have often reminded me about the dltq core - Don’t Lose The Question. To not forget the basics because the stream of information keeps on moving. But the zeitgeist draws me in, the mood of the moment. Micro-second.
Yes, with twitter and similar micro-blogging services we have entered a phase with even shorter attention span. It’s like we are all on crack, the internet crack, and we cannot stop and pause very often.
Sometimes we do, and sometimes we write great blog entries as a result of it. But far too often, it just continues, faster and faster, ever more blog entries to scan, let the eye be trained to quickly disseminate the core of an entry in half a second. Interesting? Not?
As John said in his Information Dystopia promo “I didn’t go anywhere, I just stopped making videos”.
Do we become invisible if we stop posting new stuff? If we stop twittering, facebooking, friendfeeding, deliciousing, blogging, vlogging, commenting, linking, trackbacking, and jerking off to internet personas? Does that tree in the forest exist if nobody is there to observe?
The internet culture is very narcissistic, it breeds that narcissistic core in us, breeds it, breeds it, forces it forth. You can’t even link to something important without the focus on it being Who linked to it. You start a twitter meme, discussion, and before long it turns out that all it does is feed your own twitter-status. More links to your blog where you give more information. Subscribers. The attention hierarchy.
In 2005 when I started working for a blogging consultancy in Norway as a customer relations guy and “the blogging expert” to hold workshops for corporate/organizational clients, I kept asking myself these questions. How much does this organization Really want to break through the membrane between them and the public? What do they want to do with their blogging?
The questions grew, my doubt in my ability to show these people the potential of the medium grew, and I kept running around in circles. It stopped me, halted me, and I started to mumble. There was something about all of this that made me uneasy. Despite the potential. Despite the amazing potential this has for solving so many of our communication challenges.
Sometimes I meet a new person, and we go through the usual “So, what do you do?” and I tell them about what I do, my expertise, and what we in Visibility will do. I remember the last time I talked about this to a girl, mid 20s, studying sociology, and when I talked about this, her eyes lit up, and she said, “That’s so interesting“, and I was like “um, yeah, but”.
Why the but?
Is it the fear that we have been given a tool, like the fire, and all we use it for is to burn down the forest?
Is new media just going to turn into the old way of doing things, with a few twists? The attention hierarchy, the simplistic measures of success, the eternal quest for the Next question, the Next conversation topic, without really building on the previous ones, building on them, processing what we learned.
I don’t mean to be all sceptical, but the question has been with me: Why blog? Last year, after I was assaulted and suffered the head concussion, I had frequent sick-days (had severe nausea about once a week, making me unable to work for 1-2 days). The autumn I tried once again to be involved, and I started writing on Radikale.net which is the online forum for my political party. When October came, and the parliamentary elections were announced, I got involved with that, the videoblogging in politics, and we were a few people who made videos in our party that election, like in 2005 in Norway. The election results were not uplifting - our party lost some seats in parliament, and what we tried to do with our videos - talking with regular citizens about political issues - were not proving very successful. I still suffered from the nausea at times. I had quit my work in the academic bookstore because of the election work, and later that late autumn I decided to move towards new media again, and together with Mikkel Sarbo I eventually established Visibility (website coming soon).
This winter the situation back home got worse and my mother became entangled in a court case fighting over custody for her youngest son, my 14-year old brother. I did not do much to support her, not much I Could do from here, but it was all eating me up inside. A million little ants.
In May I got the opportunity to go to Georgia as an election observer and to do some video shooting. After I got back on June 4th I went into paralysis again, and it has kept me still for the last months.
Would you Blog about these issues? Or rather talk about it with a few friends you know well? My mother lost her court case, by the way, and she is now going through appeals process. My brother (a video of him from a few years ago here) is still living in this home for youths, where all the other inhabitants there are very mentally handicapped, scaring him. This all leads back to the 80s, a very different story, and our 1996 win of our case against the Norwegian government. Things that I do not blog about, partly because I don’t define myself in terms of those aspects of my background, and I rather prefer that others do not do so either.
Those who know me well, like A-K, K or P or even J, know of my relationship with my past, with organizations, and my own attempt to get rid of these eternal questions that riddle me. To me, videoblogging cannot ever be reduced to yet another distribution channel for the same attitude like earlier. There are companies and organizations that get that, and others that do not. I consider my job within Visibility to find ways to help them get it. That the blog is not just about You, it is neither a way to re-cycle articles written and published in national newspapers.
With one of our clients now the contact person really wants to understand and use the media to its fullest. The next weeks I will be busy working on that case, making sure that their corporate blog does its best. Next week I will also become more actively involved with Canal Africa, including my own show on there. With my background in internet video, broadcast tv is a new area. I will do my best to blend the two approaches.
To blog or not to blog. That is not the question. But it is often difficult for me to talk about whatever are the shiny new objects or interesting projects from around the world when my home area is troubled. It’s how I work, while I know others have no problem either blogging about externals (linkage) or internals (subjective storytelling) in their own crisis moments.
August is here, and it will be an exciting autumn. If all goes well, I will be going to Azerbaijan in October to cover their presidential election, there is VlogEurope 2008 in Budapest, and there are also the Visibility clients and Canal Africa station.
Sorry about this long, rambling post, but I think it is important for me to see this blog for what it is: A personal blog.
Hope you all have a fantastic sunday!
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That addiction’s why it is important to me to be able to make and share media easily - so that I may live fully engaged in the analog world and yet, engage the wider digital world with little stories.
Yes, Jan, that’s the thing. Sharing digitally what we experience in the analogue without letting the tools ‘get in the way’.
Little stories - I like that.
Did you know that my Mom is dying?
Probably by the end of the year.
It’s not a surprise because she’s been sick since I was a kid.
Few people know about the situation because it’s not the kind of stuff I choose to blog about.
We got our lives, and then we have the media we choose to share.
Like you, I post haphazardly; it comes in waves.
I’m really more concerned about keeping an archive for when I’m an old man. I won’t remember that I didn’t post for 4 months. I’ll probably be more amazed that I bothered to post at all.
Here’s an article about being so open online: http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/so-open-it-hurts
Every once in a while Ill get an email from someone I knew a long time ago who googled me and found my blog. They always use !!!! when they talk about all the videos I’ve posted about the past 4 years of my life. I post infrequently but it’s the stuff I really find interesting.
The great thing is we can just go crazy online.
We got plenty of these folks in our corner of the web.
I am sorry to hear about your mother’s condition, Jay. How does it affect your daily life? Do you visit her often?
Thanks for that link, Jay. It was a very interesting article.
My philosophy for my openness is not some naive disability to keep things for myself, but rather a rejection of the creation of brushed personas. I received an email yesterday from a friend who is pretty good with blogging and things digital. He told me how he did not post about his problems, his depression, at all. Of course, we all have our boundaries, and I think we should be careful with what we disclose, but it’s kind of funny: Social Media … isn’t quite as social as we make it to be.
You are right - it really IS amazing that we post these things. As I make a new push to get involved in different things, including this broadcast tv channel (local tv but still), it will be interesting if I can post some of my work, the behind the scenes, the questions, the solutions.
I sometimes use blogging as therapy. Is that wrong?
It is monday. New week in a pretty new month.
i loved reading this post and the comments
yes we still exist,
yes we make decisions about what to post and not to post, when to spill and when to seal the lid.
the hardest thing for me is that when i am holding back from ‘contributing’ i find i also let connections with people slip as well.. all these people i met through my engagement with videoblogging et al. have space in my heart, and just because i’m not online it doesn’t mean i haven’t forgotten them, i’ve spent so much time connecting with the my physically present friends over the last year that i can sometimes feel guilty when i realise how long i haven’t been in touch with any of my more remote friends. i check blogs here and there but hardly read discussion lists.. and i keep slipping photos on to my own blog so that if people are acting the same as me (the concerned lurker, the corner of the eye trained on those peoples lives that we don’t want to forget) then they’re interest/concern is satiated.
as jay says, there is something of the ‘archive’ tendancy for me.. i haven’t stopped collecting, just been a bit slower on the distribution.
that’s all for now (as it’s probably the longest blog comment i’ve written in 2 years!) .. my heart is there for those still attached, for absent friends, for family members in need, and for the silent invisibles who never really stop listening and caring.
haha good to hear from Duncan.
I always knew he was alive and well.
many of our early friend have just gotten into action.
Raymond, to answer your questions:
I deal with my Mom in different ways. Mainly talking with other members of my family. Ryan. Strangers I meet who have been through similar situations. No easy answer.
I personally would have a difficult time trusting anyone who shared everything about their personal life online. we call this “oversharing”. Remember Justin Hall’s breakdown?
I just do what I need to do online…and try not to let what other people think bother me. we’re all making this up. (remember when we all started videoblogging in 2005? things havent changed really.)
The balance between the offline and the online is what I strive for. And a better stream of information between the online and the offline.
A better organization of the information. I mean, a better way for us to Deal with the information. As humans. As a collective.
Most important of all is our friends. The people we know, the people we care about.
Sometimes we need to distinguish between our blog being “a shout to the whole world”, and something else. A public garden. Friends gathered. A party. The audience of ten, which we talked about back in 2004/05.
Justin Hall’s breakdown was part of his schtick. The video was there, and then it was gone. I lost the copy of it that I had made for myself. Of course, it is there, somewhere, and it is in our memory, but at the end of the day, it was what it was.
But I agree regarding oversharing, and I am constantly finding the limits for myself. The last years I have been mostly un-sharing. Keeping more to myself.
But yes, the people. I have thought about sharing things via bittorrent in the past - I am thinking about it again now. We will see.
Many many thanks for the comments. Duncan - so great to hear from you!
Great thoughtful post, Raymond. I hear you and read you and think about what you say. I have great respect for what you say. My only hope is I can give something back.
I think the internet can be whatever we want it to be and do for us what we want it to do for us. I’m optimistic. I don’t think we will repeat old modes of cultural production and attention-seeking. All we need is imagination and creative thinking. But it’s a battle, and we need to pick fights. At least that’s my fiercely determined warrior-like mind talking.
With our previous wiki Crewscut.com and now Kaplak, I’ve started a long journey of studying the internet, which doesn’t seem about to end any day soon. I’ll continue this journey along with everyone who joins me, you and everyone else who is examining what’s going on. I have a gut feeling that PageRank will soon be insufficient for the amount of information we face globally on the web alone. So insufficient, it will render itself useless. We need filtering methods, which are a lot better. Right now the best are bookmarking sharing services, blogs and social messaging, but none of these forms and tools are nowhere near levels of maturity, and may need further development and rooting out of problems.
Hamlet just died on me this last week. He was my dog and my trusted friend in 11 years of my life, from my confused mid-20′es to my concerned mid-30′es. It was and has been terrible. Only slowly can I begin to make sense of it. When he became sick a week ago I looked online for answers. It was a mess. Google could give me nothing but vague leads, which actually led me the wrong way - to believe what I wanted to believe. Reason? Easy. Google gives you what the most people experience, and the symptoms you look for gives you the most common diseases or illnesses, not the unusual ones. But life is unusual. Life is never what “most people experience”. Life is tough. Turns out we can’t rely on “most people’s” answers. This is what PageRank delivers. We need tools and services, which can give us tough answers to tough problems.
The question for me is : how do I find the answer I look for, when I look for it? How do I connect with someone on the other end of the world, if he or she is precisely the one I am looking for or need to be looking for, without knowing them?
We have huge problems with answers to these questions. We can’t rely on Google for this, a company and tool which have grown so convenient on us, that we sometimes cease to question the algoritms providing our answers. This is a huge mistake, but we can help do differently, dig deeper and find out more. To do this, yes, we need to be visible to others doing this work, so that we may share our research. There’s no visibility for visibility’s own sake, traffic for traffic’s own sake etc. I want to connect and need to connect, if our project is to succeed, not just for our little company, but for us, the people of this planet, to sort out things, find out how to do new things, share knowledge, etc. Crack some real problems. This is what it’s about for me. If I blog or don’t blog, it doesn’t matter. I’ll pick the tool which suits me for the purpose I need.
Right before Hamlet died, I had a small crisis with Twitter and control over my data, which eventually led me to Identi.ca and Evan Prodromou, and then again eventually to http://autonomo.us/ which I’ve come to appreciate highly. Control over “the cloud” is the next battleground in what I believe is an ongoing global battle for the institutional ecology of our information technology.
I believe we’ll all find out where and when to pick our fights, but I believe it is a struggle, and there’s no way around fighting it, if we care about our lives, our dear ones, our world and everyone in it. What I can’t respect is looking the other way, and hopefully, what I do can help create tools which make it easier to participate in this battle, whether one sees it as a battle or not.
Morten spells it out well.
I find that the technology isnt the problem, but our goals.
what is it you want to do with this online this?
find a girlfriend?
meet interesting people?
change the government?
make art?
document the “truth”?
be famous?
get rich?
i think this is the stage many of us are at.
Some have already chosen and are running full steam ahead.
Some of us are still figuring it out.
not a bad place to be.
These are good questions to be asking.
@Morten: Thank you for your comment. I am Very sad to hear about Hamlet passing away. Did you in the end figure out what he had been suffering from?
Yes, picking our fights. You are right. I know I am late in replying to your comment, but I have thought about it a lot. What fights do I pick? Are they the right ones?
Thank you again for your comment. I should write more now, but I will do it in a bit instead.
@Jay: Yes, I am one of those still figuring it out, 3 1/2 years after discovering the field at all.
@jay, you’re spot on
@raymond, me too - I’m also in the process of figuring out. I think I have periods of time where I am more certain of it, than in others - and then something happens or comes along which makes me doubt a lot of things again.
Hamlet died from a brain haemorrhage or a fast growing tumor in his brain. He went into coma-like sleep, and had terrible periods of unrest. The haemorrhage pushed on his sight, his balance system and eventually he lost control of his breathing. It happened within a week, with the last two days being the worst. To begin with, we didn’t realize it was so serious. We never saw him as old and prone to sickness. Yet he was 11 years, and both we and he were lucky, because it happened so fast and . This didn’t make it any easier of course, though. It was (is) tough, as he’s been a part of me in all those years. It sucks.
The net is wonderful for even highly finetuned and specialized information and communication networks. It can be a lot better, though. It has a lot of maturing to do - and a lot of stupidity, technological elitism and lots of obsolete laws, industries and business models, which do nothing but stand in it’s way. But it’s getting better