Blogging – Page 6 – Auxiliary Memory

Blogging, WordPress and the Future

I’ve been blogging for awhile. I started with LiveJournal, and then moved to WordPress on my hosted site, and finally to WordPress.com. I like the convenience of WordPress.com maintaining everything, and I’m developing a wish-list of desired features I hope they will roll out in the near future.

First, let’s think about blogging in general. The basic idea is to write a post and get comments. Older posts are pushed down and stored away, and the general method used to find these older stories is either by categories, search box or calendar grouping. It’s pretty effective for what it does, but I wonder if other methods might be developed to organize the overall site and expand the theoretically limits of what it means to blog. WordPress is constantly adding new widgets, so their structure is built around adding features, so this post is going to suggest some features I want and imagine where I’d like blogging to evolve in the future.

Paid For Feature Modules

I don’t know if I can expect all my desired features for free, but what if each module was a paid add-on or part of a plus service? I have no idea how WordPress makes its money. It’s a great free service that doesn’t appear to use ads and what few add-on features they do sell don’t look like big revenue generators.

Some of the features I’m wishing for could be part of a $49.95/year plus package. I’ve invested a lot of time in WordPress, so I don’t mind paying. I don’t want them to go bust – I want WordPress to be around for generations to come. I assume WordPress wants to maintain their current marketing plan of offering a free service, but I can picture my blogging needs expanding, and I imagine so do others.

Right now there are too many Web 2.0 services. I can share my thoughts on WordPress, my photos on Picasa, computer work on Zoho.com, friendships on Facebook.com, genealogy on Ancestry.com, my book lists on LibraryThing.com, and so on.

What I’d like is one place to present the digital me. MySpace and Facebook want that place to be their services, but I’m not happy with those sites. They are too restricting. What I want is one place to combine all the features, and for now I’m thinking my blogging home at WordPress.com is the place to start. I have no idea if the people who produce WordPress want to be such an enterprise, but I’m guessing my desires are just part of an evolutionary process on the web and somebody will offer them.

The Digital Me

Let’s think of a blog as an analog for a person’s life. Right now blogs model people with the diary format. Before computers, memoirs and autobiographies were two ways to convey a person’s life. However, those formats depend on linear progress and some random discovery. When you meet someone at a party you don’t get to know them in a start at the beginning, end at the end, fashion. Generally you start talking about a subject, and this is covered by blogging with categories. But if you’ve ever been to a blog site of someone you like to read and they have a long list of categories it’s not very inviting. And if their current three posts are all boring then you’ll get the wrong idea, even if they wrote a brilliant post just before that.

Science fiction has for years imagined artificial beings or speculated on machines recording people’s minds and converting them into computer beings in artificial worlds. I’m thinking a blog could be something like that – a download of your personality. But you need a face to represent the whole of your being.

Table of Contents

Magazines use their covers and table of contents to promote their top stories, hoping an eye catching headline will get you to buy a whole magazine and read the rest of the issue. However, magazines are not good structures to model a person’s complete life, but the TOC could be a good format to use for an introduction, or your face. Home pages on blogs take you to the latest post. I’m wondering if WordPress could create a Table of Contents page to use as the default home page, something that would combine the features of the About page and table of contents, to welcome blog visitors and help bloggers introduce themselves, giving guests a bigger picture of what you are like. Also, let this page have more layout options, use a 2-3 column HTML table to organize the structure, and allow the maximum customization.

Since the word categories is already used, have an organizing unit called “Projects” to be a super-group above categories. I like the word “projects” because I like to think of organizing my life into projects. Marketing people might come up with a better word. Maybe tie it in with major personality traits. Here’s an example of what I mean. For the Table of Contents page have several user-created Topics or Projects called Family, Friends, Work, Hobbies, Travel, and Reviews. Under Reviews I might have category listings for Audio Books, Books, Movies, Television Shows, Music, etc. Under Family I might have categories for Parents, Wife, Kids, Genealogy, etc. Then allow each Topic/Project to have an icon or small photo in the layout, so visitors at a glance can see how the blog writer organizes his or her life.

TimeLine

Another fun format to add would be the TimeLine – something to help people remember when and were things happened. Since people have imprecise memories, you’d have to have a Date field that could handle years, months, seasons, and days. I don’t think hours and seconds would be needed. (Fall 1949, 12/7/82, January 1971, 1963.) Users could enter birthdays for family, and then school years and schools. That way people could quickly know how old they were in a during a particular school year, or what years they worked as a bag boy. Bloggers could enter dates for when they met people, got jobs, saw concerts, had children, went on vacations, etc. Additional fun features would be hyperlinks to web sites that show the TV schedules, top news, best selling books, big movies, etc. for each year to help prompt memories.

Lists

I like keeping a list of the books I’ve read, my favorites, the ones I own, favorite songs, my CD library, favorite movies, DVDs, movies seen, etc. Lots of people are list makers, and so having a list making module would be awful cool. Like the TimeLine module above, this would force WordPress to get into the database business, which moves them more into the Zoho.com type service. WordPress could offer both custom database applications and do-it-yourself kits.

Genealogy

Blogs are about people. I use my blog to help remember things. One of the things I’ve always meant to get into is genealogy – but not in a big way. What would be amusing for blogging is to enter enough information so it links to other genealogy sites and to other bloggers, so when you meet people you can glance at their ancestry and maybe check if you’re related. If this linkage grew eventually we’d be able to say to our blogs, “show a family blogging tree.”

Who Is Your Blog For?

When you’re typing away at your blog posts do you do it for friends, strangers, or yourself? I call my blog Auxiliary Memory because I’m getting more forgetful all the time. I really would like to use my blog as a supplemental brain. If WordPress had the security, I’d even like to save private information on my blog. Not bank account numbers, but just data only I would want to see when I’m trying to remember something, maybe something personal like address books, Christmas card lists, work and home To-Do lists, etc. I’d also like to keep my last will and testament and parting thoughts, so when I die, especially unexpected, I can leave some last messages.

Now do you see what I mean when I think of a blog as a digital analog of myself? Right now blogs are a collection basket for thoughts, but it could collect other personal items, like photographs.

Photos and Time and Place

There are plenty of online photo galleries for people to share their pictures, but I’d like one integrated into WordPress. Why separate thoughts from images. I’d like to tie photographs to the TimeLine and to the Genealogy. Currently we enter posts by today’s date and time, but I’d like to be offered a field that would let me enter posts for past dates and time, that way I could organize my photographs chronologically, and work to remember the past.

It’s quite obvious what would happen if you could link photos to genealogies. I’d also like to link photos to streets and cities, and I would like to connect to other people to share photos linked by time and place. I moved around a lot when I was a kid. Imagine putting all my photos from Maine Avenue when I lived at Homestead Air Force Base from 1962-63 into the system and someday getting a message from long lost friends who went to Air Base Elementary with me?

Photo Rotation and Linking

Right now we get one photo for our header to represent our personality. It would be great to draw from a pool, so on some pages visitors would see images from a random rotation from the pool of personal or stock photos and for other pages, specific photos to go with the content of the post.

This would be a nightmare to roll out for WordPress. It’s much easier to manage the system when there’s a limited number of templates for users to build their sites. For this to be practical, WordPress needs to designate certain sized photographs – so all header photos would be the same size for a particular template, as they do now, but offer you the system to switch photos on the fly. When you create a new post you’d have the opportunity to link to a photo pool folder or link to an individual photo. This wouldn’t require a major programming change, and WordPress would sell a lot more space. Of course, it would be nice to link to Flash videos and animations too.

I’m Sure You Get My Point By Now

By now you should see the trend. I supposed with XML and web services many of these features could originate on companies outside of WordPress, or allow these features to work across all blogging sites. I love the idea of OpenID and that needs to be expanded. Selecting a blogging service like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal is like selecting a nationality, but we shouldn’t have language barriers to keep us from communicating across borders.

It may even be possible that various blogging services could work together so you’d have memberships on more than one service and combine the results. I see people trying to do this now but the results are disjointed, like they have multiple personalities, or they want to have separate public identities. I hate when I leave a reply on a Blogger site and it wants to send people to my Google identity rather than my WordPress identity. My FaceBook page should just have a widget that displays my WordPress blog instead of trying to duplicate a blogging feature.

Has anyone thought about the ramifications for blogging for decades? Or generations? Permanent storage needs to be addressed for historical purposes. I always like to ask people, “What would the world be like if Jesus had a blog and we could read it today.” Whose blog would you want to read from history? File and data formats are going to have to become standard if they are going to be readable in a thousand years. And if you spend a lifetime crafting your blog so it represents who you are, do you want it to die just because your body can’t go on?

These are just some idle thoughts on my part. Start thinking about what blogs could really become. Just wait a few years for when WordPress rolls out its AI widget that allows you to program a talking personality to go with your blog. All it’s personality will be based on your past blog entries. Eventually, we’ll be able to talk to our AI and it will automatically create our posts just from interviewing us.

Jim

Roping A Wayward Mind

In the excellent essay, “The Myth of Multitasking,” Christine Rosen opens up with this 1740s quote from a Lord Chesterfield to his son that I can’t stop thinking about:

There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.

I wished my kindergarten teacher had started every day of class with that lesson because it’s obvious that I have never accomplished anything significant in my fifty-six years because I’ve always been trying to do two things at once. I’m a jack of all trades, master of none kind of guy, and it annoys the hell out of me.

This morning’s activities will well illustrate my need for focus and the pitfalls of multitasking. After my shower I started ripping CDs with my second computer, rolled out my exercise mat and started doing my yoga-like back exercises while daydreaming the opening scene of a novel I’d like to write, while another part of my mind kept reminding me to work on the short story I had been fleshing out in my imagination yesterday while exercising, and thoughts of three or four blog ideas buzzed like bees around these main ideas hoping to get more bio-CPU cycles themselves, while I was also trying to remember who I wanted to see today, where I wanted to go, and what I wanted to do with my Saturday.

If I followed Lord Chesterfield’s advice I would have had a single-minded Zen-like focus on my exercises and my back would be much better for it. (I just jumped over to put a new CD into the burner and ran to the kitchen to feed our cats.)

After my exercises I got up and checked my email and stats on this blog page and followed a link to a web site that mentions John Scalzi’s comments on fame, followed the link to Scalzi’s site and then found a link to Wil Weaton’s site where he discusses fame and then I found a link to Stephen Fry’s site, also about fame, but a very long well thought out essay. This gave me an idea to write a blog post about how it’s more rewarding to read a famous person’s blog than to actual meet them for a few minutes.

(Next CD to rip, which requires getting up and using the computer on the opposite side of the room.) Before I could start writing that blog, while doing a previous CD change, I got the idea I wanted to reinstall my Roku SoundBridge, so I could play MP3s on my computer through my stereo in living room, and got up and went looking for it. While tearing through two closets trying to remember where I put the Roku, I got ideas for several projects dealing with organization. I have boxes and boxes of wires for stereos, computers, televisions, DVD players, etc. that I really must organize one day. I was slightly distracted by the tight squeeze of clothes hanging in the closet, making it hard to get to all the boxes and remembering my promise to my wife to throw some worn clothes out, when I finally found the Roku.

(Next CD) I was surprised by how easy it was to put the Roku back into service but I discovered something interesting. The Roku was listing the music from both my computers, iTunes on the main machine, Windows Media on two machines, and FireFly media server on the second machine. This revelation inspired me to write a blog about the most efficient way to serve up MP3 files in a home network. (Next CD) I wondered if I booted up the laptop if it would see that machine too. (A pause to go pet a sick cat and think about a blog about the pet healthcare crisis.)

As you can see my mind is very far from Kwai Chang Caine’s focused mind in the old Kung Fu TV series. (I’ll stop the annoying interruptions about the CD changes and other diversions while writing, but you get the idea about how I’m constantly trying to multitask.) If I was a Kung Fu master, I wouldn’t own a wall of CDs and be trying to convert them to my computer library because I wouldn’t be into owning things.

If I was a real writer, with a focused mind, I would get up each morning, work on my novel and not think about about a dozen blog ideas, or another dozen short story ideas, or even worry about organizing a CD collection, or care about my clothes closet or boxes of wires. I never finished a novel because, like Lord Chesterfield says, I’m trying to do more than one thing and there’s not enough time in a lifetime to do all that.

On the other paw, I am pretty good at multitasking if I’m willing to accept that I do so many things in a half-ass way. I have four clunky websites (not counting several I manage at work). I read about fifty books a year, and see a hundred movies on DVD and at the theater, and watch several hundred TV shows and documentaries. I have a big collection of computers, books, magazines, CDs, gadgets, and other crap that I maintain and help do my part to keep the economy going. I read a zillion web pages every year, and my Karma level is excellent on Slashdot.

Task Switching

Now over at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann offers his opinion in a podcast also called The Myth of Multitasking. Mann’s take is multitasking is impossible for humans, that people aren’t parallel processing machines like supercomputers, and the best we can do is be very good at task switching. Furthermore, it’s his belief that some people are good at task switching and others are not. The implication being that some people can easily bookmark their place when they switch tasks. Mann also believes once you discover you can’t multitask, you will lose the anxiety over getting so much done and focus on getting the job at hand accomplished.

My theory is the human brain is a fantastic bio-computer that parallel processes on vast scales, but the conscious mind is just one thread that runs on top of everything else that can’t really multitask, but like Mann suggests, can task switch. Whether this is a good feature of Human 4.0 is yet to be proved. Maybe multitasking will be a prominent feature of Homo Superior 1.0, but for now we have to decide what’s the optimal operating expectations for who we are now.

Attention Span

Should I trade all that fun chaotic juggling to be just a guy focused on writing a novel? Is it even possible for me to be Mr. Zen Lit Man? This brings up the second lighthouse beacon of an article I read this week, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly, that only fuels the fire of my desire to seek a simpler focused life. Mr. Carr confesses that Google and the Internet living has reduced his ability to read long works.

If we could multitask, the length of any working process could be infinite, but if we can only task switch, then the critical factor is the time segment devoted to each task. What Mr. Carr is suggesting is the Internet is making us used to living with short task segments and we’re losing our ability to process longer tasks. This is an interesting idea, but I have to ask: Did people have the knack for focusing on longer tasks before the Internet?

Long before Google, magazines and newspapers were featuring shorter articles with lots of side-bars, and short attention getting blips of information. Television, with sitcoms and more and more commercials started dividing up our attentions starting back in the 1950s. The car radio has long had buttons to quickly switch between shows for those weak of attention. Imagine what the television clicker has done to our minds?

I too have found that I can no longer read hours at a time on a single book or long essay. I had a different theory as to the cause of this, and assumed I had been corrupted by audio books which allows me to listen to other people read long books. I justified my laziness by pointing out that those people are much better readers than I am, and that I learn so much more when I can concentrate on their readings.

So now I have two theories to test. There might be many reasons why I can no longer read books hours at a stretch. One that comes to mind is comfort. I get back and neck strains, and my eyes weary quickly. Large print helps, but to be honest, I genuinely prefer audio books. After reading Carr’s article I will strongly consider my continual effort to multitask or task switch as a cause of attention deficit. I will admit that when I read too long on anything I get antsy for new input. The Internet might support my addiction for keeping multiple threads of thought going.

Conversely, if I’m going to be a real writer, as opposed to a blogger, I’d need to focus on one piece of writing at a time, and keep focused on that piece, draft after draft until it’s perfect and I could sell it. In other words, I’d be forced to do ONE thing for weeks at a time. I don’t know if I could handle that. Task switching might be natural, and the ability to focus on a single task may be a special talent. My friend Mike who is also a programmer says when he programs he feels like he’s in a deep well and all distractions are far away. I truly envy him for that gift.

I can’t take a crap without reading a magazine while thinking through a handful of ideas about what I’ll do when I pull up my pants. What if I got up this morning and just worked on writing that short story I’ve been meaning to finish for years. The one I come back to the most often? And what if when I needed to consume or evacuate I’d continue to think on that one story. It certainly would help if I lived in a studio apartment with little beyond a bed, desk, writing equipment and four white walls. No wonder Pride and Prejudice was so great, there just wasn’t that many distractions back in Jane Austen’s time.

I guess the real question is whether or not I could do the focused thing just one hour a day? It’s an obvious compromise of where to start. However, I think real writers probably sacrifice a giant pile of fun diversions to get a quality book finished. Maybe I just don’t have that kind of mental makeup. If I found a magic lantern and the Genie granted my wish to concentrate, would I be happy trading in a year’s worth of active diversions to produce one science fiction novel? That scares me. It sounds boring and lonely.

Dedication to Details

Last night I saw an episode of Nova about making Japanese samurai swords, and Friday night I saw a documentary that included a piece about a Chinese guy making traditional bows and arrows. In each case, these were complicated skills handed down from the past and required the artisan to devote his life to his work. Both documentaries pointed out that these acts of devotion to extreme details were being destroyed by modern culture. Few people in our society dedicate as much of their time to a single-minded objective, but there are some. Olympic athletes, classical musicians, and other successful people in any discipline.

There is always the chance that multitasking and Googling is common in society because that’s how the brains of most people work. If I had a brain for single minded focusing I would be a person pursuing something very focused. We see all those enchanting martial arts fables, like Kung Fu Panda where a slob of a mind can be polished into a diamond-point jewel of focused attention. Is that really possible? Maybe such training is possible if we start as children, but I doubt it for middle-aged adults. Can I and others improve our minds with incremental improvements, especially late in life, well I think there’s plenty of evidence for that.

We know that doing the crossword puzzle or the sudoku will exercise our brain, so I would imagine reading long articles from The New Yorker and The Atlantic will condition our mental focus towards longer attention spans. I would also assume we could follow Lord Chesterfields’ advice by starting the day by making a short list of things we want to do, and then work on them one at a time. My closet is still a mess, but if I stuck with it, focused my mind, and only worked on my closet, it would be finished with an hour’s effort.

A New Theory of Multitasking

I think some kinds of multitasking are possible and aren’t bad. I wouldn’t want to sit and burn CDs until I had finished all 1500 of them. I think I could safely work on cleaning out my closet, listen to an audio book and burn CDs and be a success if I finished the closet in a reasonable amount of time and did a perfect job. Actually, this may be a form of true multitasking, because my mind would be focused on the audio book story, and my body would be working to organize the closet and rip CDs.

People can do two things at once physically, but it’s uncommon – like rubbing your abdomen in a circle with your right hand and patting your head with your left. I can’t sort speaker wire and switch out CDs, so that would be task switching. But is it task switching or multitasking to listen to a book and do something physical that doesn’t require much mental processing like walking, doing the dishes, sorting wire or swapping out CDs?

The Good Old Days

I think many people would like to return to the good old days of a less hectic life. They feel that life would be better if they didn’t have so many programming events demanding time slices. Makes me wonder what my Main() loop looks like. The belief is we’d be happier with fewer function calls and more time where our CPU usage falls to 0%. Personally, I’d be philosophically happier if my log files showed more completed jobs, and fulfilled if I routinely shipped some fine 1.0 products. I have learned that achieving a zero email inbox is very satisfying. I don’t think we need to become Amish or Tibetan to find happiness. I do think that learning to tame the mind is a worthy goal and all these mental lessons that are a byproduct of computer usage and Jetsons-fast living is helping us evolve.

I am reminded of some odd advice. A modern day guru, or maybe it was a comedian, suggested getting up every morning and pistol whipping yourself if you had crippling fears of being mugged. I wonder if I got up every morning and focused my mind intently on any kind of mental exercise, if I wouldn’t build up some focusing muscles? If my flitting attention ever settles down to allow me to pursue such an experiment, I’ll let you know the results.

Jim

Do not go gentle into that good night

The title above comes from the Dylan Thomas poem and I encourage you to take a moment and follow the link and listen to it. It’s about death and dying, not a particularly popular topic for the young, but the ghost that haunts anyone past fifty. I am only fifty-six but thoughts of Social Security, Medicare, retirement and getting old invade my thinking regularly. We Baby Boomers tend to believe everything is about us, but I’m finding it interesting to watch the generation before ours get old and see how they face death. This generation is sometimes called The Silent Generation, but I’m starting to hear quite a racket from them.

The Baby Boomers were born from 1946-1964, and the Silent Generation are from 1925-1945, basically from Paul Newman through Pete Townshend, giving a whole new meaning to the song, “My Generation.” The generation before them were the G. I. Generation (1900-1924) that included my parents. So the Silent Generation are those people who were college kids when I was little, and the driving force of the pop culture we Boomers grew up with. Now they are number one on the runway ready to take off for that famous unknown destination. I, and all of my generation, have a lot to learn from them. And what got me focused on this group, is this bit of humor.

Awhile back I discovered a great site, Time Goes By, to observe this generation, the brain child of Ronni Bennett and her promotion of Elder News. She doesn’t like the label elderly because it implies frailty, and prefers old or elder. Ronni focuses on elder blogging and through that I am finding doorways to the people of the Silent Generation. Interestingly, Ronni lists Auxiliary Memory in her blog roll called ElderBlogs – and by her definition I’m in the elder group, and I’m happy to be so. Her site is for the Silent Generation but includes us Boomers who right behind them. The Internet is generally thought of as a hang-out for the geeky young, but Ronni often points out her elder crew are one of the largest growing segments.

I wished I was retired and had all the time in the world to read all the RSS feeds from Ronni’s ElderBlogs. These are people I identify with, and people exploring issues and experiences I’m exploring now, or better yet, people who are going through experiences I’m will soon experience.

I constantly tell friends my age about blogging but they say they don’t have time, or they aren’t into computers, or friendships you make online aren’t real – but I’m finding the movement of Elder Blogging to be a major cultural trend and feel my friends are missing out. It makes me think back to high school days when my hippie friends felt too cool to go to the proms. I know now I missed out by being too cool. I think my friends are missing out by thinking the blogging world as being too young, too geeky, or even too impersonal.

Ronni is onto something by making her reporting beat the elder bloggers. I think the people expressing their feelings on her ElderBlogs sites represent a new social bonding that is just as real as any connections made at church, bridge clubs, retirement homes or in bars. Sure, it lacks the warmth of intimate friendship, but so does most of our day to day social contacts. Where blogging shines is hearing the deeper thoughts of people, thoughts beyond the surface topics you often hear at work like “did you see the game last night,” or “think it’s going to rain tomorrow.” Blogging allows you to get to know a lot of strangers in a way you’d normally not in real life – just click down Ronni’s list of Elder Bloggers and see what I mean.

Jim

Blogging and the Hive Mind

I’ve always meant to write a “Why I Blog” post and now that I’m listening to The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen this seems like a great time to do it. I googled Keen and many of the reviewers I read just dismissed him out of hand. Keen is essentially calling all us bloggers monkeys with typewriters. He’s not kind to amateur writing and talks as if the Internet is one giant slush pile that is assaulting the true quality writing that comes from traditional publishing.

Keen does make some good points. One point he champions over and over is culture is better served by the expression of the elite few rather than hearing from the democratic roar of everyone. Keen also suggests the idea that television would produce better shows if there were fewer channels and he also believes the emergence of YouTube dilutes what the average viewer watches down to crapola.

Now I don’t disagree with him. If all the video we watched came from twelve networks then I’d say the average quality of TV would be pretty damn great. In fact, for TV viewing I’d prefer having only twelve networks. I actually miss the days when there were only CBS, NBC and ABC. During those years I felt I had a stronger bond with my friends and family because we all watched the same shows. Three is too few but five hundred is too many. The same math does not apply to the Internet.

Keen believes the time people waste on reading blogs could be better spent on reading professional edited magazines and books. He also believes that the web undermines the economy of traditional publishing. I think in both cases this is true. However, he misses the point on the real value of blogging.

Blogs and blogging actually have many purposes. Few bloggers see themselves competing with Time, Harper’s or Scientific American. Most blogging is social and their posts would be competition with casual conversation rather than paid writers. Some bloggers are just writing public diaries and many others are just following the herd hoping to meet other like-minded creatures.

I do believe there is a small percentage of bloggers who would like to be real writers and use blogging as a form of practice. However, I can’t imagine them wanting to kill off commercial writing because they all secretly hoped to get published and paid too. Many bloggers dream they can make money blogging but Andrew Keen shoots down this idea by interviewing owners of high traffic sites. I also talked about these get-rich-quick bloggers in my post “Has Google Become King of the Spammers?” I don’t equate blogging with these people.

All of this doesn’t discredit Keen’s attack that the web is hurting professional publishing by distracting readers from buying books and magazines. The world of money centers around attracting eyeballs and minds. There is always competition for people’s attention. Even before the Internet parents and educators wanted to recapture the attention of their children and complained the choice kids faced was between quality and drivel. Back then the pundits worried that television was empty calories and books were primo brain food for kiddies. Now Keen is protecting TV from the Internet.

Is Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur just a descendent of Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham? Both men could be right in their campaign to defend culture but they could also be wrong in that they missed the qualities of a new art form. What does blogging bring to our world that didn’t exist before?

Instead of being passive individuals that consume predigested information produced by the elite, people on the net embrace being active through self-expression. The Internet represents a do-it-yourself revolution. Sure, by the yardstick Keen measures blogging does not measure up – yet. The value is not in what’s being expressed but in the effort people make to express themselves. Blogging represent amateur essayists. I remember back in school when the teacher assigned writing a 500 word essay it would bring about groans. Now millions want to write such essays every day. Is that a bad thing?

Personal computing has always represented a strange kind of revolution and transformation. I helped hundreds of people learn to use a PC back in the 1980s and I always felt sorry for them. Suddenly jobs for secretaries and professors required that they learn all kinds of new skills that was never part of their jobs before. The average worker now has to learn skills once left to specialists like typesetters, graphic layout artists and computer operators. Now the net is expecting little Jacob and Emily to write and edit, and for some to be sound engineers and video production technicians. Is that so bad? Most of the people producing the content for the web are rank amateurs and Keen doesn’t like that. To Keen everyone is practicing the piano and it’s painful to hear.

Personally I think Keen is worrying too much over nothing. He screams the sky is falling by predicting there will be five hundred million blogs by 2010. It’s my theory that blogging will fall out of favor before 1/12 of the human race takes to the blogosphere. There’s a good chance that socializing on the net might be a fad. I say this because I see an awful lot of dead and neglected sites. It takes a lot of work to maintain and grow a site. Blogging isn’t for the lazy. Nor does it have wide appeal.

I do not have any friends my own age that blog. In fact, I have a very hard time getting my friends to even read my posts. Even when I tell my wife that I’m writing about my girlfriends she can’t find motivation to read my writing because the world of blogs isn’t real to her. Now blogging might be an age related activity, or it might be a person-type activity. Most people I know define socializing as meeting other people face-to-face. Blogging is a kind of hive mind socializing that allows certain kinds of people to enjoy communicating in a non-face-to-face mode, and I think that greatly limits the audience.

Which brings me back to why I blog. I always wanted to be a writer because I loved to read. I’ve taken a number of fiction writing courses, including many hours in a MFA program. I also attended the Clarion West writer’s workshop in 2002. It’s a semi-serious hobby that I’ve tried to work at more since I turned 50. Blogging is writing and publishing without an editor. I consider it practice writing. Forcing myself to write 3-4 essays a week is a kind of discipline. And it’s very educational.

Blogging has taught me that I have to entertain readers and that’s very hard to do. When you’re young and want to be a writer you assume you’ll hammer out a novel and people will want to read it. Well, they don’t. I use blogging stats as a tool to measure successful stories, and so far I have not been very successful at all. My best day was hitting 149 readers. And even that number is deceptive because most people come to this site by accident. WordPress shows me the search terms used and it’s obvious in most cases what people want isn’t what I’m offering them.

My two most successful essays “DRM and iTunes and Rhapsody Music” and “Did AAPR Rip Off My Old Mother?” were flukes dealing with topics outside my normal range of interests. That’s actually a great lesson of journalism – write about what people want to know and not what I want to naval gaze. Of course then I’d always be writing about Brittany Spears or how to create web sites that brings hordes to Adsense links. I have a lot of room to learn and practice. There are zillions of great essays to study and my hope is to find many models to work from. Eventually I’ll write posts that succeed in the way I want.

I also blog to make friends. My wife had to take a job out of town and I spend a lot of time in my house alone. This has forced me to socialize more with face-to-face friends, but I also find blogging to generate good company. I love the passion that my fellow bloggers show for their subject matter. I admire many for their skills and I study them hoping to improve myself. I see blogging as a self-improvement hobby.

I have also discovered a by-product of blogging that is very beneficial to me. In recent years my memory has gotten more sieve like. Since I’ve started blogging I’ve slowly changed and I’m now retrieving words better. I worried I was on the road to Alzheimer-land. Blogging is good for my mind and helps me learn discipline. Keen is right – I don’t write as well as a professional writer. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve. Blogging challenges me to improve every day. I read other blogs and admire what they have done and that pushes me to do better. I read professional magazines and study their quality and that makes me want to write better too. Keen missed this whole angle that deals with self-improvement.

Finally, blogging makes the world smaller. There is a hive mind quality about the Internet. I think of the Internet as a sixth sense and it disturbs me that my friends only live in the world of five senses. This is both metaphorical and real. I think Andrew Keen devalues this new kind of neural network of bits and bytes in which we’re all a synapse. Keen really hates Wikipedia and fails to credit the hive mind for creating something both useful and wonderful.

I think Keen has some valid criticisms in The Cult of the Amateur and I’m going to return to them time and again. I think blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and all the other products of the net can be improved. Many magnitudes of evolution will happen on the net in the next ten years. Reading Andrew Keen won’t save the old ways of things, but his criticisms will help us to grow stronger. Keen fails to see the competition of the fittest angle is this brouhaha. I think traditional publishing will survive and thrive and the net will only get more powerful too.

Jim

Fantasy Inventions 001

Philip Pullman created a wonderful fantasy invention in The Golden Compass when he imagined humans having a dæmon as an external soul to share their lives. His Dark Materials I believe is the largest selling recent fantasy series after the Harry Potter books, so the idea must really appeal to many people. It’s a crying shame that the recent film version of The Golden Compass didn’t do well at the box office and I wonder if it’s failure was due to the fact that the dæmon invention was too complex for the mass audience.

This morning when I woke up at 4:30 am and was deliciously drifting in and out of sleep I came up with a fantasy invention that tickles my fancy. I wonder if it’s too complex to make a good story. What if on our birthdays instead of celebrating them with friends we spend them with time traveling versions of ourselves from each year of our life? Imagine a party of ninety where every person is the same person but from a different birthday along their timeline.

Think of the possibilities and ramifications of such a fantasy world. First off we’d have to have a POV (point of view) character. Remember we’re inventing a fictional fantasy world and not one that actually works – so things need to be logical within the narrative. Giving the story to one POV character as he grows older, and maybe even telling the story in first person will simplify conceptualizing the fantasy invention and plotting.

We can start the story when our character is about to turn five and he goes to sleep only to find himself waking up at a new kind of birthday party were all the guests are older versions of himself. They try not to scare him but they encourage him to do well at things that five-year-olds struggle with and they promise they will all be back for another party when he turns six.

Most people hate taking advice, but would you take advice from yourselves if you knew they knew the future? To complicate our story I’ll have this natural tendency continue and our character will be reluctant to change. We’ll have the kid learn over the next several birthdays that the characters who come to visit change in personality and in number. Because on some birthdays there might be ninety people visiting but on one birthday only twenty-two show up warning him that he could die young. Our character will learn that the group advice is good and following it has impact, but it can be conflicting coming from different aged selves.

Of course this breakthrough knowledge will come on his thirteenth birthday when our character gets surly and refuses to do any school work. He will be shocked by his future selves and their limited number. From then on he will try to act on his insider information.

Now that you have the idea how this fantasy invention works we can explore the philosophical and literary implications. How often on some talk show or documentary have you seen some old guy being ask if he would change anything about his life and then hear, “I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing!” I always find that mind-blowing. Even if I had been immensely successful, if I got a chance to live my life over I would do it all different just because life offers us infinitely more options than we can ever experience.

On the other hand most of us aren’t wildly successful and the chance to do things over would give us the opportunity to improve our lives. This fantasy invention would be a metaphor for that. This idea is a variation of one of my all time favorite books and fantasy inventions: Replay by Ken Grimwood from 1987. Jeff Winston dies at 43 and wakes up back in his old dorm room in 1963. He slowly realizes he gets to live his life over with the knowledge of his previous life. You can imagine the obvious plot line here. I mean, what would you do if you were in his place.

Jeff lives his life over, dies again and then wakes back up as his earlier self, but slightly later than before. Again he has to relive his life, but this time he wants to do something different. Now you see the meaning of the title. Most people won’t be familiar with this novel but will know about the 1993 film, Groundhog Day that essentially uses the same fantasy idea with a different gimmick.

My fantasy invention is a variation of these ideas but the character only gets to live one life. It’s philosophically about taking advice rather than learning the lessons of life through many repetitive hard knocks. To make the story more dramatic we can have the party also grow smaller each year because no character that is younger than the POV attends. Thus the story becomes a literary tontine.

There is a variation of this idea, but without the advice aspect, that was a biography of Ernest Hemingway. In this fictional documentary I saw decades ago the setting was a bar filled with men of varying ages, but the viewer quickly learns that all of them are Ernest Hemingway. The theme of this story is about how the same man disagrees with himself at varying ages.

Fantasy inventions are the wonderful aspect of fantasy writing. The possibilities are endless. I’m always shocked when I read a fantasy book that essentially uses a retread of an old fantasy invention. Just how many sexy fantasy witches like Samantha Stephens does the world need, but they’re still very popular in the fantasy magazines. I guess Heinlein should be very flattered because look how many books and video games today seem to be based on his invention of Starship Troopers. And should I even mention Tolkien?

It’s really hard to invent a totally new fantasy invention like time travel in H. G. Wells The Time Machine. As brilliant as it was Mark Twain had already written A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. If you follow the time travel link to Wikipedia you’ll see there were many previous works. I think there are essentially two ways to work with a fantasy invention. The first is to create a unique variation that is used for a philosophical statement. The second is to create a unique variation or retread to create a fun story. Even though Groundhog Day is a silly comedy, I think it makes a number of philosophical statements.

Now that I have my fantasy invention worked out will I write a book? I wish, but it’s very doubtful. I come up with these inventions all the time, thus the 001 I tagged this entry with, figuring I might write about the next 998 ideas that pop into my head. I wish I could write a book. I just don’t have the discipline. I’m using this blog to practice. You are actually listening to my piano lessons for writing, I would say. Hope all the banging and sour notes don’t hurt you too much. My blogs are usually around a thousand words. To scale up to a novel I’ll need the skills to compose something 100 times that large. For a few years I worked on short stories, but I have trouble organizing 5000-10,000 word pieces into valid fictional and essayist structures.

There is a skill involved with structuring of large wordy works. I can barely make these blog posts coherent. Most blogs are non-fiction. I wonder if I should practice fiction in these posts. That would be weird. However, it’s one thing to take a thousand words and lay out a fantasy invention, it’s a whole other thing to scale it up to 5,000 to 15,000 thousands words of a short story or short novelette. I wish I could. That gives me an idea for my fantasy invention character – have him become a writer, with the older versions giving him advice on writing. That would be a nice twist. I could even make the story into meta-fiction and have all the future selves represent experiments in characterization.

Not bad, not bad. Anyone like the idea?

Jim