Be careful what you "Like" ... (social media, data mining, and blatant self-promotion)

I just finished a book called Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman.  I read books like this as often as I can find them because this is an area where my personal and professional interests intersect.   My library school degree is actually a MA in Information Studies, and my personal interest is tied to the fact that I am an avid consumer of digital information, and a somewhat skeptical user of social media .

My initial reaction, after only the first chapter, was to abandon social media altogether. So I put down the book and deactivated my Facebook account – knowing even as I did so that it would be temporary. Within an hour, my mother (who is not on Facebook) called to ask me why I hadn’t updated her about a family member’s health condition, which had been mentioned on Facebook. I gently reminded her about all the reasons (excuses) I have for not remembering that sort of thing  (work, stress, being the daughter of my father) and sort of implied that if she felt she was entitled to that information, maybe she should create her own account. And then, feeling guilty, I reactivated mine.

However, there are many reasons I do intend to maintain my social media accounts. I have friends and family all over the world and I like seeing their photos and updates and getting mini-glimpses into their lives. I like the filtering options on Instagram that allow me to take pictures of my dog and edit the image so that her adorableness resolves on the screen instead of appearing like a blacked-out, dog-shaped hole.

And I do this for professional reasons. Because “everyone else does it” and I work in a job that requires knowing and understanding everything I can about meeting the informational needs of our customers.  And maintaining a searchable web presence is, in itself, evidence of technical capabilities that future employers might require.

So, I’m not going to give up social media – and that isn’t what this book is trying to achieve. Instead, it’s just raising awareness of the personal and commercial effects of a society intent on documenting, preserving, promoting, and sharing its private life.

If you want to know about all the ways social media can negatively affect a person individually, there’s a wealth of information out there (including this book). There are also a lot of resources about protecting your online reputation, or increasing your social status, attracting more followers or friends etc. 

The reason I’m writing this is because of a key point of which I wasn’t fully aware and I think it’s worth pointing out.

Most social media sites have embedded widgets across the internet to enable what Facebook calls “frictionless sharing,” which means I can hit a like or a heart or +1  button and share whatever I’m looking at with my friends and followers (in fact, after I post this blog, I’m going to hit that button to share it with you). 

Sharing this information serves two purposes. The most obvious is that I can easily share something I’ve created, or discovered and found interesting or funny or meaningful. It says to my group of friends “Hey! This is cool” or “This is what I believe” or “This is weird/outrageous/unacceptable.”  “This!” gives you, my friend, a little more insight into me – as a person. And if you agree, you’ll like it too and validate me. And if you don’t like it, you’ll disagree and we’ll have a conversation, or you’ll roll your eyes, or at worst, you’ll block me, or something.  Whatever …

But the second role this “frictionless sharing” plays is that each click of a button adds another data point into a file that is kept about me, my interests, preferences, personal beliefs & biases – and that information is then used (and often sold to interested third parties) to target me for specific advertising campaigns, or to filter what displays in my various feeds. If I like a post a friend has shared about an underdog presidential candidate, I’ll start seeing more posts like that. And if I get tired of seeing videos about dogs, I can click a button in Facebook and say “Show me less about this” and then Facebook will know I hate dogs. Everything I like or ignore or even hover the mouse over but decide not to click is registered by these sites and then fed into algorithms that determine the content I see every day.

And what I click on could then be used, along with my profile picture, to promote an advertisement that shows up in your feed. When you see a post that refers to something I liked, (it could be a mutual friend’s status update or a band or a business), the information is presented in a frame as an insight into my personality, when it’s actually being used as an endorsed advertisement.

I’m not saying this is inherently bad – but people need to be aware that by engaging in these posts by clicking, liking, sharing etc. you are doing more than showing approval or insight to your friends, you are also participating in widespread market research. These social media sites and third party business and corporations are capitalizing on what used to be one of the most reliable and valued forms of local advertising – “word of mouth.” Think about it – when we’re looking for a mechanic, or a hairstylist, or a lawyer, we ask our friends first… and often, their endorsement means even more than a 5 star review by an anonymous or unknown person.

I’ve always known that what I “like” on Facebook  (or external sites) displays to my friends, and I try to be selective about what I click – because my relatively small group of friends is actually very diverse. It includes family members, friends from kindergarten and college, and former, current and potential coworkers … not to mention people I actually want to impress. This is why my social media activity is limited almost entirely to self-deprecating jokes and pictures of my dog (who I hate*).

I recognize that many people use their social media accounts to actively promote political ideologies, spread awareness of important civil rights issues, affirm religious and spiritual beliefs, or to seek support and validation in times of emotional crises. This is one of the more positive features of social media – the fact that it allows people to form communities and support networks across a broader spectrum than they might find locally or in real life. 

The point I'm trying to make (and the point of this excellent book) is that we need to keep in mind that while we’re sharing our lives and likes with each other, we are freely contributing to a data collection system that uses the information we share in ways we may never have intended. And we need to be aware that the information and advertisements displayed in our feeds and sidebars, especially that which appears to have been endorsed by our friends, is an unreliable and incomplete representation of our interests and personalities. Just like everything else we see or say on the Internet.

(*I don't actually hate dogs. Except for this one:)

Writing about writing about yourself

I’m reading a book that I could have written.

I’ve read many books I wish I’d written – books about the college experience and confusion and finding oneself. About prisons and libraries. Books or stories that so perfectly captured what I’d known and felt that, after reading them, writing about those experiences myself would have felt redundant, unnecessary, and I feared, produce a lesser version.

That’s not how I feel this time.

This book is about keeping a diary. I got my first diary when I was 8, and over the next 10 years I wrote about my feelings and thoughts and frustrations off and on in spiral-bound notebooks.

And then I took a writing workshop 15 years ago, the summer before college, and started writing on purpose, keeping track of the words in numbered notebooks I called journals.  Everyone who knows me knows about the journals. I took them to England and brought them back again.

Last week I started #50.

So I’m reading this book about the diary a woman kept over the course of  25 years. From my brief research about her, it’s clear we are very different. She is married, and has children. She has published several memoirs. She is a professional writer.

But this most recent book of hers, I know I wrote it too.  I’m reading her words and I’m writing down in my journal (as I do) the things she says that feel true, and I realize I have to stop after less than 20 pages because every idea, every sentence, is familiar. I have to stop writing out her words because I’m going to transcribe every one.

The book is called Ongoingness: the End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso.

“From the beginning, I knew the diary wasn’t working, but I couldn’t stop writing. I couldn’t think of any other way to avoid getting lost in time” (4).

From the beginning, writing has been a compulsion for me. So many times, I couldn’t sleep without first writing out the day, recording the feelings, reliving them, writing first about what happened, then how I’d reacted, and finally, what I wish I’d done instead. I seem to make a lot of mistakes, some of them over and over, and rereading my journals has only ever confirmed that for me.  

“To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget” (6).

At first, it was a shock to me to realize I might record an alternate version of an event and then, in rereading it, the written version became the new memory.

I tested it out. I’d change certain details to make a better story, or to cover up the shame, and the altered version always overwrote the memory. It didn’t quite settle – I reread some of these entries and there are clues that it didn’t happen that way. Maybe because they’re too polished for what should have been a first draft.

So, I’d read those entries and know it didn’t actually happen that way … but I still can’t remember the truth. That scared the shit out of me. It meant that not only couldn’t I trust myself to record a true version, I also couldn’t trust my own memories.

So, I stopped writing for a while. There’s a gap in my journals which starts in late 2008, and continues through 2009 where I wrote almost nothing – 17 entries for that entire year -- and only really picks up again after I left England and moved back to Arizona. But without that record, fabricated or not, I remember almost nothing from that time . Leaving England was the most significant decision I’d made since choosing to move there in the first place, and I have almost no record of it.

I know I was unhappy.

And I stopped writing because I wanted to forget.

But now I can’t remember why I left.

“I’ve met people who consider diary keeping as virtuous as daily exercise or prayer or charity […] They imagine I have willpower or strength of character. It would be harder for me not to write it, I try to explain […] I write the diary instead of taking exercise, performing remunerative work, or volunteering my time to the unlucky. It’s a vice” (10).

When I picked it up again, it was deliberate. I started a writing project with my mother – the Daily Theme blog – and suddenly I was back in the habit of writing almost every day.

And once that happened, the words started spilling out again – most of which were not appropriate or relevant to our project. And when I say not appropriate, I don’t mean salacious or sensational. At that point, I was almost 30, unemployed and living with my parents. Still I was filling pages and pages again, and most of those words weren’t related to the topic of the day – but in order to get to that topic, I had to wade through all the other thoughts first.  And I needed a place to put them.

“Twenty-five years later the practice is an essential component of my daily hygiene. I’d sooner go unbathed” (11).

Most of the time, I write about the things I should be doing instead of writing. I write about how I should be taking a bath. Or cleaning the house. Or laundry. Or I write about how I should be writing about other things.  Instead of writing about writing, or forming an actual finished essay, my journal contains mundane and repetitive lists of things to do, ways to change, and goals to meet, and then is often followed by almost hourly updates on how I’ve already failed to achieve them.

When I was in college, I remember being very frustrated with a friend who would say, at any given moment, “I should be studying right now.” And I hated that – I hated the idea that we were having a good time and all she could think about was what she should be doing instead. I hate that I have become that person, describing how I waste my time. I write about that a lot.

“Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect” (16).

I too want to achieve that effect. But I don’t know if it’s impossible. When the writing really takes hold, and I stop mouthing the words under my breath as I write them, a direct path seems to form between my brain and the pen  (or the keyboard) and I’m often surprised reading later what I’ve said, because I didn’t know that’s what I thought. Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

I write better than I speak. I don’t know if it’s a confidence thing, or the fact that I get distracted by the sound of my voice, or that I’m afraid to see the effect my spoken words have on the listener – because when it comes out wrong, it’s awful. I never share a first draft with a reader, why do I have to speak words without thinking? When something comes out wrong on the paper I can scratch it out, but if I say the wrong words out loud they can’t ever be taken back.

Yet when the words do come out right, when I’ve expressed not just how I feel but how someone else might feel, and if someone reads these words and understands … then it doesn’t feel like a waste of time anymore. When I’ve spent more time revising the words than the time it took to write them, it doesn’t ever feel like a waste.

I’ve reread, reworked, and rearranged these particular words over and over. This is not my journal, but it feels like I’ve been writing this piece for 15 (or 25) years.

And that book I’m reading doesn’t quote a single line from her diary. The journals and diaries are just notes on life for us (the writers) alone. When we share our words with anyone else, we choose those words on purpose, for a reason, and with care.

“The only thing I ever wrote that wasn’t for an audience was the diary” (94). 

Color(ful Vocabulary) Antipathies

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of colors that I dislike so much that I avoid them, but even neon colors (which I extremely dislike) look all right in certain contexts – like Las Vegas (which I also dislike). So I googled this title, and aside from being proud that The Daily Theme was number three on the listed results, I was surprised to discover this expression has racial and sociological connotations. So Kelly suggested this could seg nicely into a comment on the recent Huck Finn scandal over the replacement of certain words in a new edition intended for children.

We were driving to a grocery store yesterday when my phone beeped with an incoming email and when I checked I saw that it was my daily update from the ALA’s discussion group on LinkedIn. “The Librarians,” I said, turning to Kelly, “are Angry!”
 

Censorship, which is what this revision is being called, is one of several issues librarians are ethically bound to have an opinion on (another is Privacy).  However, a well-reasoned argument on either side of this issue is difficult to achieve when the forum restricts character length (as in Twitter, which is where some of this conversation is taking place), and people react from a hardwired emotional place. And actually, this emotional reaction is what the publishers of the new edition are trying to avoid from young students of color.

From the censorship angle, I just have this to say: we are not being called to burn all former editions of Huck Finn. No one is trying to erase the original text – this new edition everyone is so fired up about is not even the first abridged version to censor the racist lingo. See here a Junior Classics edition published 12 years ago.  I am no fan of censorship in any situation, and if and when I have children, I will make sure they read the original version once they have reached an appropriate age. But like me, they also will never be able to understand the genuine devastation and outrage provoked by that word.

In the course of our discussion, Kelly and I realized that as two highly educated, middle-class, white women our ability to rationally discuss the context and literary value of the n-word was exactly the sort of ‘white privilege’ we heard Black scholars rail against in college. We do not have emotional reactions to this term because we have NO IDEA what it’s like to be systematically oppressed and subjugated (no matter what we might claim when our feminist hats are on) and to claim a place in a discussion of the appropriate use of the N-word is arrogant and disrespectful. 

*This post was originally published at The Daily Theme on January 12, 2011

On Discovering Myself

I may owe Eckhart Tolle an apology. I haven’t decided yet. I still fall asleep if I read more than  3 pages of The Power of Now at a time but the dreams, they are peaceful. I’m kidding (sort of), but people I respect recommend this book – people who have opened their hearts and minds to new ideas that I have shared so maybe I owe them, and maybe I’ll learn something, if I can just shed my automatic and cynical revulsion towards New Age vocabulary. I’m not sure why, but I resist terms like “self-actualisation” and the expression “inner peace” creates for me an inner storm of  bitter and sarcastic retorts. Yet, I envy the lifestyle and secretly want for myself the calm these crazies claim to have achieved.

For Christmas this year, I received Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I had already seen the movie and didn’t find Julia Roberts’ character to be particularly likeable. And I felt the same about the book really, except again for the envy and attraction to the lifestyle that this woman experimented with for a year. How nice for you, I thought, that you could take a year off to run away from everything you had screwed up for yourself and a publisher was basically going to pay for your pursuit of pleasure and … see the bitter, jealous side of me bursting out? I wish someone would pay ME to do that. I want to hang out in Bali and learn how to meditate in an Ashram in India. I would even settle for a weekend retreat at the Buddhist center near my house.

So, at the same time I’m thinking about all of this, I’ve just come from the ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in San Diego where I did not find a job, but got a lot of useful advice about job hunting. I’ve even come up with a quarter-of-a-million dollar idea, that I don’t think will make me rich, but might take my career in a new direction assuming I don’t lose interest.

The key-note speaker at this conference was, of all people, Ted Danson (promoting his book Oceana) and he summed up his interview with a brief explanation of his belief in the Law of Attraction (another theory I have both dismissed and secretly been drawn to) and how any changes we might want to see in the world or in ourselves must be approached from a positive angle, from a place of joy and delight instead of fear or disgust. Fear and Disgust have always fueled my sense of humor (in which I take joy and delight) but I recognize truth in Mr. Danson’s words. And Mr. Tolle said (just before I fell asleep) something about how he wasn’t saying anything new in his books, instead was just reminding us of truths we had forgotten.

What surprises me is that I am actually open to these ideas. Maybe it’s a developmental stage. In both Tolle and Gilbert’s books they were roughly my age when the desire to make a profound, spiritual change came over them. Maybe that explains why I felt drawn back to Church. I’m not looking for God really, I just need to calm the hell down and learn to sit quietly by myself. That’s the appeal: To learn something about myself that I’ve forgotten that I always knew.

I'm including this picture because I have it on my phone.

*This post was originally published at The Daily Theme on January 10, 2011