Rettberg Chapter 3: Social Networks

I thought the most interesting thing in the chapter was the discussion of centralized vs. distributed networks. One of my problems with social networking has often been that so much of it is centralized in nature, at least most of the stuff that we see as “social networking.” We maybe have some freedom within the confines, but in a lot of these situations we are still under agreements with Facebook, MySpace, and even Twitter.

The Corporate Influence

Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International

The above is a recent article that shows the power in these social networks is not always the people. The commercial applications of social networking are huge, and wherever there’s money it’s hard to avoid an imbalance in power.

I think there is an element of freedom in having your own space on the Internet that is lost with these large social networking sites, but the centralized model does tend to make it easier for people to find each other. It’s still depressing to hear all these stories about people feeling they’ve been unjustly pushed around, though, especially when people put so much of themselves into sites like this. A suspended account can be quite the inconvenience. Also as pointed out by Joe Moubry discussing Facebook fine print, even beyond all this back and forth of money and power, these centralized networks can claim ownership of your content. I really don’t like giving up that kind of control, even of the general kinds of silly things one would probably use Facebook for.  Granted, such fine print is probably there to cover Facebook from the confusing world of copyright more than anything, but it’s a little strange of giving up, in a way, ownership of your personal life to a company.

The Audience

It was also intriguing to read about just who is reading all this stuff anyway. Rettberg calls it the “invisible audience.” I think the first time I personally really realized the extent of what that meant was when two things happened at about the same time. The first thing was a complete stranger I met through a friend had seen something I’d done online, and the second was when my brother (who I had not told) did. Sometimes one wonders just who’s reading all this stuff anyway, but public does mean public. You can try to write for a certain audience, but in an open Internet the audience you get is not entirely under your control. There are lots of privacy settings that you can use, but for the most part I still think it’s legitimate to treat the Internet like a public space. There are too many ways to find things if a person simply tries. If you really want to be a creepy person, all you need is a little bit of information to start with and a Google search box. Have you ever tried Googling yourself?

And now this very post is out there, able to be found.

Okay, all you invisible guys are creeping me out.

Rettberg Chapter 2: Historical Perspective

Reading Blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg again. This time moving on to the second chapter, which attempts to put blogging into the overall story of communication in general. Let’s try using headings this time.

Mass Media

I really liked this chapter. I started to think about the term “mass media.” It seems to have a rather negative connotation now, but it also means tons of people can get information. I think there comes to be two ways of looking at it. Mass media is either media designed for the masses by a few people, or it is just media that can be distributed to the masses. In that way, I suppose you can look at blogging as a mass media. Almost anyone can access that information, and hey if they don’t like it they can turn around and complain. Sure just because anyone can see it doesn’t mean they will on something as huge as the Internet, but the fact is it’s still there in the open.

Bringing up the days of a few people putting together small print pamphlets got me thinking as well. I think there are a lot of parallels to blogging that can be made with that. Such small publications were a key part of early American politics. When I actually started to think about it, some of that writing that I’ve seen does really echo what you see in the world of blogging today. That highly opinionated and personal style is what characterizes a lot of political blogging for me.

Argument, Conversation, and Writing

Of course people have always argued, but I also wonder how well we are arguing now. Rettberg also discusses how text is unable to explain itself. Blogging and other forms of Internet communication do give us that ability to have back and forth discussions on what would otherwise be a static article, but I wonder sometimes if we’re actually able to take full advantage of that. She discusses how it goes back to oral communication and a larger sense of community, but I’m not convinced it’s quite the same. There is a lack of immediacy that I’m not sure we’re quite used to dealing with yet. It takes more effort to type a question than to ask one, and people are naturally lazy. I’ve seen time and time again on the Internet that people often find it easier to just assume whatever they want about your text, and, ironically, expend far more energy firing back a lengthy rant about how you are stupid.

It’s a somewhat interesting thought, because I have often felt highly stressed by using the written word to communicate with people. I worry about the permanence of it, the lack of being able to clarify a point. There is a certain in-elasticity to it. You can’t react on the fly to the facial expressions or objections of another person. Fitting these ideas into an academic context, I recall an Honors class final exam that consisted of having face to face conversations with people, and then writing down a summary of what happened. Another Honors class consisted almost entirely of conversation about such wide-ranging subjects as the nature of free will to economics. It’s not the same as writing a paper or giving a presentation, and I think that gives a lot of good perspective for me on what Rettberg was talking about.

Mindset of Print

She also discusses a change from a world where there is one authoritative text distributed to the masses. What she calls the mindset of print. The advantages of this are huge, and I think she did a good job laying out how blogging gives more people a say, but it also gives me pause. Sometimes I fear that we can easily become too isolated in our own little bubble worlds, only listening to what we want to hear. If there is no authoritative text of Romeo and Juliet, say, if someone only read the ‘happy ending’ version, how can they even have a conversation about it?

I guess my thought is that it has to be an extension, rather than a replacement. I think it’s good to have a base line from which we can draw to share with a huge variety of people. A movie like Avatar, for example, is something you can talk to almost anyone about, because everyone has seen it. Still, I like that the Internet allows us to hook up with people that share our more specialized interests, because there’s nothing as satisfying as finding someone else that has seen that super obscure film you like so much. I just wonder if removing the idea of “authoritative text” entirely once again moves us towards that idea of living in a very specific bubble or niche. It’s important that this ability is freeing, rather than confining.

Oh boy, next is social networking.

SOPA in Traditional Media

So, I just want to throw this out there to people, but I’ve been finding it interesting to think about SOPA in terms of traditional media in order to better grasp the somewhat nebulous situation in the realm of digital media.

I think the problem everyone has with this legislation is that it targets and forces responsibility on those that provide transmission (ISPs) and some of the foundational systems of the Internet, such as searching for content (Google) or giving users tools to produce content (WordPress and YouTube).

So, what I ask myself is would we ask the United States Postal Service to look through mail making sure there’s no copyrighted content being sent around the country? Do our notebooks need sensors in them that would report if someone wrote down some copyrighted content without authorization? It seems vaguely totalitarian to me, and I think that’s the point of all this. Especially because these systems are so far-reaching and often automatic, the lack of safeguards is really troubling.

It also really puts the power behind the large corporations and takes it away from individual artists in a lot of ways. Through automatic detection systems, I’ve had a video I created entirely myself be flagged as possibly infringing material. Right now, YouTube lets it slide. They didn’t even take it down, probably because they know their detection stuff isn’t perfect. As soon as we start to put more power into those kind of filtration systems, the sooner I’m left with my video gone, and not really wanting to bother doing anything about it because I’m just a college student living on student loans, and I can’t afford to go up against some company that somehow now thinks they own MY copyright.

Does this seem like a legitimate way to frame it? Does it even make sense to try to compare what’s going on here to how things are done traditionally outside the Internet? I’m interested in seeing what people have to say.

Rettberg Chapter 1: Blogging Defined

So I read the first chapter of that book Blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg, which you can buy using that convenient LINK I just made. Linking is, in fact, one of the things discussed in this chapter that helps to define what a blog is.

There was some discussion about a blog being either a genre or a medium. I think I fall more on the medium side of that, especially nowadays when one sees blogging software used for so many different purposes, just because it tends to be so easy. Putting the stamp of genre on a blog seems to indicate that you can predict the content in it based on all the other blogs out there, which doesn’t seem at all accurate. A blog can contain personal thoughts, reviews, essays, short stories, or just about any kind of text content. The structure of a blog is just convenient for the publishing of content to the web, and does not majorly dictate, to me, what you should do with it.

Still, I do also agree that personality seems to have quite a lot to do with how many blogs are put together. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose. I enjoy that it puts a little bit of humanity back into the written word, but it does introduce that problem of needing to gel with the personalities running the thing. I actually read very few blogs now because of that very issue. I rarely ever get mad reading a newspaper, but I have gotten pretty worked up over some blog posts.

As for the different types of blogs (personal, topic, and filter), I’m mainly familiar with the topic blog, because it’s a quick way to get specific information. The diary and filter blogs seem to be primarily driven by an interest in people rather than topic, and since I hate people (or something) I suppose I have less interest in those types.

More to follow shortly!

Effectiveness of Workshopping

I got a comment the other day from Kevin McColley, which I have excerpted part of below:

Do you ever worry in workshop about the too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth syndrome? It seems to me that workshops can only be genuinely helpful when the people in the workshop are experts at what they are talking about and know more than you do, and I doubt that is always, or even usually, the case.

It’s a complicated subject for me, which is why I decided to use an entire post on it. One of the questions I ask myself is what I see a workshop being in the first place. To me it’s always been a nice place to test the waters. I like having somewhere to put work out and get something back. I don’t really think that there are too many cooks in the kitchen, because the other people should not be cooks at all. There is still only one cook, and that’s me.

I suppose one could liken it to test screening a movie, which is a standard practice. The danger lies in treating the feedback you get as universal truth, and there are far too many factors involved to simply assume that. That is the kind of attitude that leads to this somewhat negative view of test screenings as the time a good movie was ruined to fit the taste of the masses. However, a lot of directors do like test screenings, and there have been positive results from their use.

The other question I ask is, “What is an expert?” The people in charge of reading your work in a workshop environment might be other writers, and that often helps in their ability to communicate to you what their reaction is, but I don’t think it has anything to do with them being able to make observations about the work. They are acting as readers, and if a reader–any reader–runs into problems reading your story, then that is a legitimate piece of feedback. What you then choose to do with that information is still up to you. Sitting down and making every suggested change without processing them through your own feelings and intentions, as well as those of the other readers, is foolishness, and often impossible. In most of my workshops I’ve gotten feedback from people that directly contradict one another.

Is this an efficient way to learn how to write? Well, yes and no. The only way to learn how to write is to actually do it. You also learn a lot from reading the work of others, even if it’s something you want to avoid doing. In a workshop you do both of those things, but I stop short of saying that doing that alone is enough. Writing is a very solitary thing, and I think in a way can only be self-taught. The workshop complements that by bringing in other eyes to look at things, and other perspectives that might reveal things you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. I suppose I view it as less teaching you how to write as teaching you about your own writing.

In that respect I have found them useful over the years. Especially because I’m entirely anti-social.

Blog #10: The Editorial Process and Me

Personally, I think being a part of the editorial process is a great thing for a writer to do. The focus is so entirely different from what we do as writers. I really enjoy looking at imperfect work, because sometimes it’s the rougher stuff that gives you a bit of insight.

I mean, a lot of that is the same as why I like reading workshop stories. They are at that state that so much of my own writing is in, that you can learn a bit more about the process, I think, than perhaps reading nice finished novels. That’s not to say nothing we get is well-edited and clean, but I guess just overall it feels like things are more “raw.”

So that makes me feel a bit better about my own rawness sometimes. I sometimes get so wrapped up in how much things I write aren’t what I wanted that I sometimes lose track of just why it’s so fun to sit and type out 1000 words of randomness some nights. I actually had stopped writing all together for a long while, and it was stressing me out. My own reawakening into writing kind of made me think about these things when I was reading over some of the work. I mean, even if I didn’t care for that Minotaur story, I guess I have to think that kid probably had fun writing it, so that’s good! Something is always better than nothing. I’d rather write something awful than just sit and not write anything at all.

Maybe I’m getting away from the point a bit. It also makes me think about how people judge writing, and that one person’s opinion is not law. We all had our different viewpoints on what’s appealing or where we saw the potential. If someone criticizes an aspect of my writing, I can tend to take it as The Law, and I have done something wrong that everyone should have known not to do. But writing isn’t like that, and maybe just because I get rejected for doing something, I have to think about it myself and figure out if I see it their way, or if I know in my heart I wrote what I wanted to.

I don’t think those rejected by our publication should feel bad about themselves, and should definitely be encouraged to try again. Even if the writing doesn’t have that much time to improve, maybe next time there will suddenly be a great idea, and that’s all it takes. As we so often see, it sometimes only takes one inspired sentence to make people fall in love with your stuff. I suppose those are the kinds of sentences I write with a smug smile on my face. Maybe you know it’s good.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts as they’ve gone through my head this semester. Just finding the fun in writing, ironically, has been what I’ve taken away from it. I say ironically, because it seems to be so much about the business of writing, but I guess learning about the business of writing makes me feel how much I think it’s separate from writing itself. You write something and THEN figure out how to sell it. I think doing things the other way around just makes boring crap.

Then again that might also be how you get on the New York Times Bestseller list, so what do I know?

Blog #9: “Accident, Mass. Ave.” by Jill McDonough

“Accident, Mass. Ave.” by Jill McDonough
Published in The Threepenny Review

The very first thing that struck me about this poem was that it tells a very clear and definite story. Actually, I thought it was rather skirting the line between poetry and flash fiction. Whatever that line might be, and whatever skirting it might mean. These categories are tricky business.

The poem even has dialogue in it, and rather colorful dialogue at that. I liked the way the poem tapped into that well-known feeling of road rage that seems to come upon so many of us. When you actually stop and think about some of the things that make you mad on the road, you realize that you sometimes make mistakes when you drive, too. It’s just easier to assume everyone but you is stupid and wrong. The addition of the language barrier with the little woman just added to that sense of alienation for me. It seemed to be about the other guy on the road we’re afraid of.

Then the heat of the moment is deftly whittled down, and it turns out there wasn’t really anything to be mad about after all. Then I was surprised at the ending where they both embrace. I suppose up until that point I had not really realized the kind of emotions that might lie underneath two people yelling at each other. That idea of being scared and lashing out has quite a wide variety of applications in our world, I think.

I really liked this poem. It was a little bit funny, a little bit sad, and a little bit poignant. No matter what you label it, it still had that intriguing ability to tell a tiny drama in only a scant few lines, and I found that to be uniquely interesting.

Blog #8: New Voices

New Voices went a lot faster than Dust and Fire in my mind. There wasn’t really a whole lot of prose to process, and I’m fairly sure the best stuff floated to the top early on in our work. I can’t remember why, but the last year I worked on it, New Voices seemed disappointing to me. I guess I just didn’t gel with the pieces we picked. This year I’m really happy about everything going into the book, and was surprised to find a lot more than just potential in a lot of pieces, even ones that didn’t make it in. These are some fine young writers.

I suppose what I’ll walk away from this one remembering the most, though, would be my concerns about the male audience. It’s something I have mixed feelings about, just because it’s kind of an iffy subject. It’s also just something you have to expect. I mean it doesn’t take the most observant person to see the lack of guys in the English department. This is just a little anecdote, but when I went to China and was staying at our sister university in Shenyang, I ended up talking to some group of students, and they asked me what I studied. When I said literature and writing, they replied, “But you’re a guy!”

I’m not saying I’m oppressed or anything silly like that, it’s just a kind of weird observance I’ve had for a while now, which is why I noticed it in the submissions we had. I felt like maybe someone might assume I was laying blame on bias in our selection process, but that’s not what I was trying to do. I’m pretty sure most of us agreed on what was the good stuff, and often didn’t even think of the author’s name or gender.

It did start me thinking a lot about the subject, though, which might be why I overreacted to the “lips with purple background” cover when we got it. I still feel bad about it, because in doing so I feel like I revealed what a self-conscious coward I was in high school. In the end, I think we were correct to stick with that design. As I looked around the room, I realized so many others were good at being rebellious teenagers, and I was more the sort to give in and give up. My life has been mostly about hiding whatever I can of myself from other people. I’m afraid to talk about what interests me, because I’m certain everyone else thinks it’s stupid. I’ve had recurring nightmares about people finding out I’m bisexual.

So while I suppose it’s a really unconventional sort of response, I came away from this editing experience with a new appreciation for not being so bottled up all the time. All these kids put their stuff out there for us to judge, and that seems like a really brave act to me. I know being judged is one of my worst fears. So I came away from this publication with a little more confidence in my own voice. Hmm. That’s just the sort of sappy thing I’d probably want to write in a preface, too.

Blog #7: Dust and Fire

This is the second time I’ve been on the editorial board for Dust and Fire, and in most of the major ways it was the same story. Going through this whole selection process seems rather easygoing. You read the stuff and just say whether you liked it or not. I did find this part to be mostly easy. I didn’t have a whole lot come at me that I learned to like over time. My first impressions basically carried through to the end.

What becomes the difficult part is after you’ve read everything and know which ones you cared for and which ones you didn’t. Like and dislike is easy, trying to figure out which ones I liked more than others was when things started to become more difficult. Some just slipped out of my mind and I let them go, but others I really agonized over. It took me a long time to put on my post it notes, because I was so busy calculating between what I thought was popular and what I thought really appealed to me. Add in the fact that some of the things I merely just liked seemed like they might contribute in some sort of way to the publication as a whole and it can take more mental effort than you’d think. At least I know during those days I’d end up exhausted, if not from thinking then from pacing around the tables incessantly.

Still, I was very proud to see that pretty much everything I had a strong love for made it into the publication. In that respect it was quite a bit different from my previous year, where I had to fight very hard to get a couple things I liked into the book. Maybe this group was just more style, I can’t say. Most of the things I wanted I just had to poke forward and people said “Oh yeah, I liked that.” Away it went from there.

So in the end I’m pretty cheerful and positive about the book we made, and I’d have to say overall moreso than the last one I worked on. It could just be me that’s changed too, so I won’t rule that out. Maybe in some way, working on this has increased my confidence a little. Even the works that didn’t get in did get read by pretty much all of us. I feel like at some level that’s a positive thing, too. I know from experience getting someone to read your work isn’t the easiest thing. It’s good that we have this chance to read such varied work. Whether it was publishable or not, it was still a collection of wildly disparate lives and people, and I think we probably all came out better for it.

Blog #6: “Bird Feed” by Ashlee Adams

“Bird Feed” by Ashlee Adams
Published in McSweeney’s

This story made me think back to my introduction a little bit. I stated a general impression that short stories tended to give me less of a feeling of character, but this story did give me that feeling. It felt like a lot happened in the story, especially compared to some of the others we’ve covered. That can be attributed, of course, to the length. I have to admit to liking longer works the most. I like things to be complex. I enjoy watching characters unfolding over extended periods of time, and that’s what I got from this story.

I noticed with some amusement that this was almost a nursing home piece, as has been mentioned a couple times in class, but it’s about more than that. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking lately about long works that cover stages in characters’ lives that I find this standing out to me now. That, to me, is what it means to be epic. So while it might seem an odd label to apply to this small, personal story, I would say it is a little bit epic. I got a clear sensory picture of Cora’s childhood and into having a child herself. By the end, I was attached to her as a character, and indeed to some extent to the setting. Which, I suppose, is another appealing thing I find in epics: a very defined sense of place.

Like many things I really like, I always find it hard to define some aspects. There is a history to the people involved. There are also things in the story that I find interesting. A brown and orange afghan. Winnie the Pooh pajamas. Jars full of insects. It’s sad, it’s comforting, it’s emotional. I dunno what it is, but I liked it.