TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "the internet"
“There are no stats programs here. There is no like button.”
Michele Catalano writes about moving back to her blog hosted at her original domain, not because Yahoo bought Tumblr, but because she wants to get away from the likes/reblogs as validation trap:
For as long as I have wanted to be a writer – and that’s about 40 long years – there was never any part of that dream that included obsessively checking a page of statistics and judging my self worth by the numbers within. I always wrote for the sheer pleasure of it, from putting that first word down to finishing the final edit, writing has always been a labor of love. Recently, it had become just a labor.
So here I am back at my old domain, the one where I started writing publicly (ok, blogging) in 2001, the one where I started telling my stories to the world. I’m taking the majority of my writing away from tumblr, away from the hearts and reblogs, away from the instant validation. I don’t want to labor anymore. I want to love what I write. I want to love why I write.
There are no stats programs here. There is no like button. I will have no idea how many people will read each post. But I will write and I will learn to love to write again.
I was chatting with Michele on Twitter, and she said, “For the first couple of years I blogged I had no idea how many readers I had. And I was better off for it.” It reminded me of Greil Marcus, talking about the early days of Rolling Stone, when they said, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t.”
So, once upon a time on The Internet a guy talked a little shit about a band he didn’t even really listen to, then a member of the band named Ed reached out to the guy, and then Ed and the guy became Twitter friends, and then when the band had a sold-out show in Austin, Ed gave the guy tickets to the show, and the guy and his friend went, and then when the guy had to drive three hours to Denton in the pouring rain, he listened to this album, and he really liked it, and he even played it for his 5-month-old son, who liked it too, and now he’s saying to you, have you heard this 4-year-old record? It’s really good.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
Edward Tufte, Complicated: yellow, print on canvas, 29 ½” x 29 ½”, edition of 3
Great piece from 2005 where Goldsmith tries to convince academics (“not painters, potters, printmakers, book artists or metal workers. Yet.”) to make all of their work freely available online. He cites the fact that he’s never made any money off of his experimental work, but by having it online, he’s been exposed to a wider readership and received numerous invitations to speak and travel:
I make sure to post everything I publish on paper on the internet. While I have never received one cent from my experimental writing, due to the web, I have traveled the world extensively with all expenses paid, garnered honorariums and, most importantly, I’ve connected with an interested readership — a peer group, really — in an admittedly obscure endeavor. Without the internet, a writer in my position would never exist in quite the same way.
He then encourages his colleagues to put aside their fears of getting ripped off and start blogging:
Blogging opens up instantaneous discourse with a group of like-minded thinkers. We all know of colleagues who post chapters-in-progress of their latest books on their blogs. Older proprietary ways of thinking would condemn this practice with the fear that your ideas would be swiped, brought quickly to the marketplace, rendering your efforts useless. On the contrary, what happens is the opposite. Like any twelve-step program alumnus knows: words are deeds. By showing your commitment to these ideas publicly, they are acknowledged by a given community as being yours. If it’s available to the whole world, then anyone trying to swipe your ideas will be outed by the public knowledge that you’re the one who has been working on this subject. Academic bloggers find that their community of readers often act as fact-checkers or engage the blogger in instantaneous debate over specific points before the book reaches the concretized state of print. Instant feedback on your work: does it get any better than that?
Finally, he “drop[s] a real secret” and claims that “the new radicalism is paper”:
Publish it on a printed page and no one will ever know about it. It’s the perfect vehicle for terrorists, plagiarists, and for subversive thoughts in general. In closing, if you don’t want it to exist — and there are many reasons to want to keep things private — keep it off the web.
“If you were someone mildly interested in cannibalism 30 years ago, it was really hard to find someone in real space to find common cause with,” Mr. DeMarco noted. “Whereas online, it’s much easier to find those people, and I think when you have these communities forming, validating each other, encouraging each other, it’s not far-fetched to think that some people in that community who otherwise might not be pushed beyond certain lines might be.”
(via @megzo)
Own your turf
If you care about your online presence, you must own it.
In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.
Personal homepages and weblogs have long since faded from the popular trends. They’re no longer hip and nobody’s launching the hot new startup to reinvent them or make them better.
Most of the interest in writing online’s shifted to microblogging, but not everything belongs in 140 characters and it’s all so impermanent. Twitter’s great, but it’s not a replacement for a permanent home that belongs to you.
And since there are fewer and fewer individuals doing long-form writing these days, relative to the growing potential audience, it’s getting easier to get attention than ever if you actually have something original to say.
Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time. It’s why, after ten years, my first response to anyone just getting started online is to start, and maintain, a blog.
One day Tumblr will be gone.
All advice is autobiographical (YMMV)
I’m working on a keynote next week for SUNY Broome, a community college in upstate NY. The name of the talk is “How To Steal Like An Artist (And
109 Other Things Nobody Told Me)” — here’s a sneak peek:
- Steal like an artist.
- Write the book you want to read.
- Don’t wait until you know who you are to start making things.
- Use your hands.
- The Secret: do good work and put it where people can see it.
- Geography is no longer our master.
- Stay out of debt.
- Get yourself a calendar. (And a logbook.)
- Be boring. (It’s the only way you get work done.)
- Creativity is subtraction.
I was digging in my archives for a photo and came across this Instagram, which I posted a few days before I gave the “Steal Like An Artist” speech. It’s funny, if you click the links: I’d completely forgotten how much material for the original speech was just writing I’d collected over a half decade or so of blogging. People talk about blogging as if it’s this ephemeral thing — you just type things into boxes and it just gets lost in the wash of the Internet, but if you do it right, if you save your writing, tag it, archive it, have a good system for going back through it, it’s pretty cool what you can turn these bits and pieces into later.
(Source: amandalynferri, via parislemon)
