Internet/Technology

Little background for people who aren’t in my Twitter feed: for years now, I’ve been doing Word of the Day tweets. Dictionary.com sends out a “Word of the Day” every day. I take that and turn it into a short story on Twitter using the hashtag #wotd. I don’t manage to do it every day but most days during the work week, I do this. It’s a fun creative way to start the morning and I’ve gotten good feed back about it.

For those not familiar with how Twitter works, it’s a microblogging platform (or it was until it went public and now has no idea what it’s trying to be). You are limited to 140 characters in your Tweets. Lots of people complain about this but it’s actually a great restriction if you’re trying to improve your writing. It forces you to distill your content down to the bare minimum. It’s definitely cleaned up my writing and made it stronger as I eliminate unnecessary cruft like adverbs. Hashtags are ways to categorize what you’ve written and allow searching. They are also used to show how funny you are. For a much better and funnier explanation, Mom This Is How Twitter Works

So imagine my delight when Dictionary.com announced a contest designed around that exact principle. Based on the URL, I’m assuming they announced the story on the 14th of February. I discovered it on the 23rd. The rules were pretty simple. Wait for the word of the day on February 25th, write a short story using the hashtag #WoTDStory. If you search Twitter by that hashtag, you’ll find quite a few Tweets using it. Digging deeper, you’ll find that Dictionary.com has run a story similar to this before using the same hashtag.

On February 25th, I got the word of the day which was sciamachy. I wrote what I thought was a pretty good story (no bias of course). And I waited.

Now the astute reader may have noticed something wrong with this entire procedure. Though if anyone did, your detective skills are incredible. In the post linked above outlining the story contest, Dictionary.com says the hashtag to use is #SuperShortStory. Problem is, that’s not what they said on February 23rd. I don’t have proof of this as Google cache and the Wayback machine don’t have archives of the page but if you search #WoTDStory on Twitter, you’ll see that there are hundreds of tweets using that hashtag and the word of the day for the 25th, sciamachy (which ironically means fighting with a shadow, something I am clearly doing here but everyone needs their own personal windmill to tilt against).

Some time between the time I found the contest on February 23rd and when it started, Dictionary.com updated their blog post WITHOUT ANY NOTIFICATION OR UPDATE and changed the hashtag for entry. Now obviously, this is a stupid internet contest. I didn’t need the ipod or whatever they were giving away. Still, it’s not exactly in the spirit of competition and fairness when you change the rules on people. So I left a comment on their blog mentioning how annoying it was that they had changed the hashtag. I did that on the 26th.

When I went back to see if they had bothered to apologize or at least let people know, my comment had been deleted. This is not how you engender people to trust your word (pun fully intended), Dictionary.com. Changing the rules of a contest 1 day beforehand because you don’t want to wade through old Tweets or whatever reason caused the change is OK. Going out of your way to try and hide the evidence is pretty disingenuous (oddly disingenuous has never been Word of the Day, that’s some Alanis Morrissette irony for you there).

Now I’m off to post this link to the Dictionary.com blog even though I’m sure it will be deleted. Even a sciamachy can have meaning to its participant.

I joined Twitter in August of this year without a great deal of thought and after long decrying the effect I was sure it had on attention. I did it mostly because there are usually 5-10 times a day when I have a thought or see a link that don’t warrant a full blog post but that I find interesting enough to want to share it with people. I tried Facebook originally but that didn’t really feel like what Facebook is about. Twitter on the other hand seemed to be perfectly designed for that sort of activity. So I joined up and started updating pretty regularly.

For my purposes, Twitter was excellent. A majority of my updates were links to something that seemed interesting enough to share. Other times, I’d have a thought that seemed Twitter worthy and based on the responses I got from people who followed me, about 25% of them actually were. Over the course of my time on Twitter, I updated 373 times or about 4 times a day. I got 159 replies to my updates. I was following 37 people and being followed by 47. I was happy with Twitter and Twitter seemed happy with me.

Unfortunately, there was a darker side. I already have issues with attention and focus. I LOVE anything that gives me a dopamine fix. Twitter was rapidly becoming a dopamine fix. My real writing completely dropped off the map. I wrote 9 posts total in 2 months on my tech blog and this one. Several of the posts on my tech blog were almost Twitter-like in their brevity. I was doing no fiction writing and no journal writing. I began to notice that I was checking Twitter 5-10 times a day, even on days when I left TweetDeck turned off. When I updated and didn’t get a response, there was a distinct mental reaction in that I didn’t get any feedback. This caused me to update more.

My focus at home on projects was nil and I had trouble getting into anything. Whenever I got stuck on something, off I went to check Twitter updates. Twitter taught me that I don’t have the discipline necessary to turn off Twitter when I needed to be working on something else.

On top of all that, I started thinking about what the result was of all this *effort* I was putting into Twitter. There was nothing meaningful going on. In 2 months, I had 1 conversation that could be considered interesting and productive. I produced nothing that I’d want anyone to remember me by, nothing useful to the greater good. The irony of my reasoning for joining Twitter is that even though I was posting things that I found interesting, none of them led to greater, more in-depth conversation or learning. They were just informational junk, no different from the junk mail that I get every day. Things that I thought were interesting were really just information junk mail, even if people voluntarily signed up to get it from me.

None of this is a judgment on Twitter. I actually think it is quite useful as a mini-RSS reader in a way, a tool that someone might use to successfully market or promote a business or a blog. I wish I could use it for that. Twitter did drive my viewing stats up on my tech blog from 1 a day to 9 a day on those days I mentioned a post on Twitter. I just don’t have the ability to compartmentalize Twitter the tool from Twitter the dopamine provider. I don’t want to look back on 12 months of Twitter and wonder why in the hell I didn’t write more in that time period. I want to produce things and that takes focus and attention, something Twitter increasingly was stealing away from me. I have a limited store of attention and the more I divided it hoping to hear that stupid little TweetDeck notification sound, the less I had to pour into something that actually mattered. I really do want more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment.

Cross posted at Mental Pandiculation

Because the internet is such a big place, occasionally you will read something that is so profoundly wrong that at first you are sure it’s parody and only later, does it come clear that the author is in fact earnestly trying to argue for something based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works these days. The latest example I’ve seen of this is this commentary by Henry Porter in The Guardian that makes more dumb statements in 500 words or so than I’ve ever seen. Among them:

• Google doesn’t produce anything
• Google doesn’t have the right to control the content it offers on YouTube.
• Google should have to pay whatever royalty amount an artist demands for YouTube videos.
• Google is a monopoly (how can one be a monopoly and not produce anything?) and there is no other way to get content out to users other than YouTube.
• Without old-style newspapers, democracy will crumble.
• Google Street View invades the privacy of citizens. (The irony that this is a British writer who lives in one of the most privacy-insensitive places in the world with all the cameras they have watching people is apparently lost on Porter as is the delicious irony that Google Street View is a product of Google.)
• Google is an amoral menace.

I know that this man is clearly an anachronism, longing for a time far past that can never return and would undoubtedly be detrimental if it did return. I feel sorry for his obvious bitterness at a world changed before him but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he’s writing in a major paper fundamental inaccuracies about, well, everything he writes. It’s called commentary which excuses it in the newspaper world but that’s just a cop-out. In any other profession, making this many mistakes in so short a period of time would warrant his dismissal. This is yet another reason why newspapers are failing.

I can’t fathom someone so confused as to look at Google and say they don’t produce anything. Perhaps there is nothing tangible to the old coot, but then there’s nothing tangible produced by his local pub or mom and pop market. These types of companies are what is colloquially called “service providers”. They don’t actually produce things, they provide services. How it is that he can both work for a major newspaper in Britain and yet fail to comprehend such a fundamental fact is beyond me. Again, it seems like it would be grounds for dismissal in any other profession.

His assertions that artists should be able to charge whatever they want and Google should not only have to bear the costs of the royalty demands but also the costs of hosting the content for free on YouTube is ridiculous on its face. Google should no more have to do that than a publisher should have to pay some third-rate author whatever he demands.

I put off writing about this article for over a week because it just seemed so sad that I wasn’t sure it warranted a response. But in the end, it’s these kinds of “voices” that have to be pointed out and held to task for things to improve. I’m sure that there has always been people like Porter resisting technological change to the end and the world has progressed quite fine. However, ignoring the fact that people like this still work for major newspapers and are allowed paid to write such tripe is a mistake. He says nothing true and nothing of value. Articles like this shouldn’t make it past the editors’ desk.

Domestic Discipline Software

Yes it is what you think it is and yes it is SFW.

The Internet is crazy.