People are tweeting and Facebooking about first kisses, relationship statuses, fights, and so much more. Should we be using social media to talk about our intimate relationships?

By Cathy Wilcox

Over at the blog Notes from the Dating Trenches, there is a good post about sharing, boundaries, and social media. Kelly writes:

There have been a few articles lately on the effect social media is having on us in terms of over-sharing. I just read one on Yahoo! about how one man’s tweet about a bad date caused hundreds of people to respond and share their own, obviously worse, stories. Like a competition. One woman said that when she showed up for her date the man asked her to go home and change because he didn’t like what she was wearing. Another man said he was freaked out because his date brought 25 photos of Sylvia Plath’s gravesite as a conversation starter (she sounds like a treat). Another admitted to accidentally pushing his date down the stairs. The man who started the tweet-a-thon was surprised, noting: “People don’t mind recounting things that in a previous age would have been considered deeply personal.” I’m sure he got over it though since he gained 5,000 followers.

Like Kelly, I’m troubled by the ways social media are sometimes used in the context of intimate relationships. Especially of the romantic kind. It seems to me that the lines between public and private have become quite blurry, sometimes to the point where people are willing to subject their entire relationships to public scrutiny (like on these reality-dating-competition TV shows.)

Introducing social media into the world of dating amplifies and magnifies every little high experienced and every mistake made.  You tweet your first kiss to a thousand “friends” and receive several dozen virtual high fives in a matter of hours. Or you write about your latest fight on Facebook and have dozens of sympathizers calling your partner all sorts of names and telling you to get rid of him or her.

How is it possible to develop and maintain a clear and realistic assessment of your relationship amidst all of this?

Furthermore, how is it possible to stand on your own two feet, and make your own decisions about your partnership when you have dozens of other voices nearly instantly appearing in your head to compete with whatever your gut is telling you?

Here are a few guidelines I have created for myself:

1. I Don’t share current relationship conflict on social media. If I want to talk about current struggles with others online, I might head to one of the numerous dating and relationship sites;

2. I don’t have a relationship status on Facebook. Early on, I did change my relationship status a few times, and found that it just led to confusion and having to tell people stories about very short term relationships that really didn’t need to be told. Dating someone for 3 or 4 weeks doesn’t need to be highly publicized, nor does the end of that connection;

3. I don’t write about “real-time” intimate relationships. Perhaps there might be some reason to break that rule in the future, but for now, I think it’s a smart decision that also upholds point #1.

How about you? How do you handle social media and your intimate relationships?

Has Social Media Screwed Up Intimate Relationships? is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Nathan Thompson explores the social graces and gremlins of commenting online.

In my opinion, making and receiving comments on blog posts should be treated in a similar way to how you would act with someone face to face. Whether you are committed to a spiritual path, or you simply wish to be an ethical person online, it’s important to consider the possible impact of any comments you leave online.

Although it’s harder to see and feel, what we say online can have just as much impact – positive or negative – as anything said in person. And because of the lack of non-verbal cues, it’s probably even more important to choose our words carefully while interacting with others online.

What I have witnessed online is that commenting on blog posts brings out the best and worst in us. When people are at their best, you can see ripple effects that spread across the world. A well-timed supportive comment can mean all the difference to someone who is struggling and feeling isolated. A clear declaration of the truth in the middle of an embattled debate can shift the entire conversation. And sometimes, something someone says “goes viral,” spreading from blog to blog, across Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, and positively impacting the views of hundreds and thousands of people.

And unfortunately, the same thing goes for comments on the worst end of the spectrum. A single personalized attack on a writer can shift an entire discussion in that direction. Lies can and do spread online, sometimes at an alarmingly fast rate. And the internet is littered with the wreckage of angry, hate-fueled arguments that sometimes have spread into the flesh and blood world with terrible consequences.

One of the challenges I have found is working to find the balance between honesty, compassion, and kindness. Sometimes, I’m responding to a piece of writing where I really don’t care for the view being expressed. Occasionally, it might even be to someone I’m not terribly fond of. And sometimes, I’m just not in the best mood. All of this can make for troubled waters when it comes to making comments online.

So, here are a few questions to consider before making a comment:

1. Are you just venting? Sometimes, I find myself wanting to tee off on some poorly written article or obnoxious political opinion piece, but quickly realize I have nothing of value to say.

2. Do you actually understand what’s being said? It’s amazing how often people seem to misread things online and then make comments based on their misreading. Which leads to number three…

3. Have you slowed down enough to digest what you’ve read? The speed of the internet and our lives in general these days lends itself nicely to rapid-fire comments that are, at best, superficial.

4. Are you just wanting to see yourself in writing? This one is tricky, but I do think that sometimes people just leave comments to be seen. The content may be meaningless or it might even have some relevance, but the true impulse of the person commenting is simply to be part of the commenting crowd.

What are your thoughts about making comments online? Have you had any experiences that made you change how you make comments on the internet?

Photo Credit

Photographer unknown

The Zen of Blog Commenting is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Jeff Randhawa faces a problem affecting many users of social media: what the heck do you say once you’re plugged in?

I am officially on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I also have BlackBerry Messenger on my phone. My problem is, I don’t have anything worthwhile to say. When I signed up to the aforementioned social media networks, I felt a great amount of pressure to provide useful comments to the people who follow my accounts and are listed as friends. Sadly, I think I have let many of them down.

My Twitter account is beyond pathetic. Since March 6th, 2011 I have three tweets:

March 6th, 2011 – Time to start reading some classics, first up David Copperfield

July 25th, 2011 – Good to hear the NFL will not miss any games. Now just to make my daughter a football fan!

July 30th, 2011 – @ryanwhitney6 Very true but not as bad as waking up ten minutes after your shift starts!

Not exactly setting the world on fire with information, am I? The last tweet was at Edmonton Oiler defenceman Ryan Whitney, who mentioned how he hated waking up 10 minutes before his alarm went off, to which I spewed out my witty retort. (He hasn’t responded yet but I continue to wait….). In regards to David Copperfield, I have even picked the novel off my nightstand yet.

I only have four poor souls who are following me on Twitter at the moment, God bless them. They probably added me to their list hoping for substantial information, but have been left with my war with reading novels, my passion for NFL football and my lame attempt to get a professional hockey to laugh at a comment.

The people I follow are in the following percentages – 95 per cent are sports personalities and the other 5 per cent are everyone else, including friends, family, colleagues and writers. I have colleagues who provide vast amounts of quality information regarding labour market and telecommunication trends. Of course, I get all my news and sports updates from media personalities, which is more convenient than surfing all the different websites looking for the news.

But then there are some of my friends and family who provide the following tidbits:

July 29th, 2011 – Long weekend! Time to get pissed!

July 30th, 2011 – Had a great time at the Whitecaps game….

July 31st, 2011 – Need to see the doctor about that lump on my neck 

Okay, so I made that last one up, but you get the gist of what I am saying. Honestly, I have never seen so much useless information in my life. I am always waiting for someone to tell me that they are about to go to the bathroom. Don’t laugh; this will happen. How many times have your heard friends tell you they dropped their phones in the toilet? It is just a matter of time before they begin telling us that they are about to go — and a part of me will die a little.

Last night I watched probably the first 15 minutes of The Social Network, the story about the founders of Facebook. I fell asleep and woke up during the credits. Being fully rested, I thought about the concept of social media and how I can use it. Like I mentioned in the beginning, my tweets are few and far between and at the moment do not provide anyone with useful information. However, I would rather keep it short and simple rather than blurting out every step I took in a particular day.

Conclusion: for the time being, I will be a follower rather focusing on being followed. I shouldn’t worry so much about the information I provide, and what others will think. There is a wealth of knowledge that is being shared and after all, isn’t that whole purpose of social media?

Photo Credit

Photo courtesy of Aurora

Being Socially Awkward in the New Brave World is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

A TED Video about the mortality or immortality of our online personalities raises some big questions.

Many of us have a social media presence — a virtual personality made up of status updates, tweets and connections, stored in the cloud. Adam Ostrow, editor in chief at Mashable, asks a big question: What happens to that personality after you’ve died? Could it … live on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Credits

Video courtesy of TED.com

Photo Courtesy of Impact Lab

After Your Final Status Update is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Lorne Daniel explores the blog phenomenon, the criticisms, the narcissism and the sexism against mommy bloggers.

Why do so many of us blog?

According to Wikipedia, as of February 2011, there are 156 million blogs in existence.

Many millions of those blogs have only a handful of readers, I suspect. Unless you’re already a celebrity, when you start a blog you will send the link to a few friends and family and watch your Google Analytics tell you that three, five, or maybe 10 people visited your site last week. Then zero the week after that.

It’s also obvious, from even the quickest scan of blogs, that many of them are terribly written, terribly designed and in other ways just off-putting. I am particularly thrown off by the sites that are shoddy sales pitches for “social media advising” and “dynamic communications” but can’t get the use of “there” and “their” figured out, or don’t realize that “it’s” is a contraction for “it is.”

So blogs are easy targets.

But before you go into a rant about our narcissist society where everyone wants a blog, consider replacing one word in my opening question. Change “blog” (an uncomfortable verb at the best of times) with “communicate.” Now re-ask the question: why do so many of us communicate?

The obvious answer: we are humans. Social animals. We chatter. We interact.

Yes, there’s narcissism involved in saying “watch me, read what I ate for breakfast.” But we all do that. We go to the office and tell a story about how our kid dumped breakfast all over the kitchen floor, how that made us late getting her to day care, how we missed the 7:40 express.

That little scenario, of course, hints at a genre of blog that for strange reasons draws more derision than others: the mommy blog. Thousands (millions?) of moms out there have found blogs to be their perfect way of connecting with the world — including other moms. For some reason this bothers others who, I suppose, think that a woman should either drop the “mommy” tag and go to battle in corporate boardrooms or just stay home and stay offline.

The criticisms are clearly sexist. Here’s a recent retort that I came across from one of my Twitter followers.

If nothing else, blogs show people who are engaged with their world. That is a good thing.

Ultimately, blogs are a reflection of people. Inconsistent. Some lovely and likable. Many less so. Often maddening. And, yes, often a waste of time.

So? I don’t know about you — I try to pick and choose the people I interact with. Same with blogs. No sense wishing that they would all go away for two reasons — it ain’t gonna happen, and you probably wouldn’t like it if it really did happen.

Image Credit

“Blog board” Mashable.com

Too Many Blogs? Get Over It is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

With the pirates and ninjas of the world becoming a tiresome meme, Mike Vardy is bringing barbarians back — and he needs your help.

Pirates have been touted as the avant garde career choice for well over a decade, with it being attached to rudimentary items such as digital downloads and dialects for a day. Ninjas are right up there as well, with their skills held in high regard in productivity circles.

Now, barbarians are another matter. Perhaps the new matter.

Back in the 80s and into the 90s, barbarians were cool. There were comic books featuring them as the protagonists (Conan would be one, Groo would be another), and they were the characters of choice in role-playing games. I’d challenge any teenager of my generation to pledge that they would choose another class other than the battle-tested barbarian when flinging quarters into the Gauntlet arcade machine.

Then, much like the tenure that Conan had as king (shorter than his reign as governor, I might add), it was over. The popularity of the barbarian had waned to levels so low that no savings throw could ignite a resurgence. But things are always darkest before the dawn…

I’m going out on a trendsetting limb here, but it’s a limb I’ve never feared. I mean, I’m the guy who coined the Twitter hashtag (#) “stalkersunday”, and its popularity knows no bounds in my own mind. So with the pirates and ninjas of the world becoming a tiresome meme, I’m bringing barbarians back.

I’m no stranger to understanding pop culture and its cohabitation with the Internet. If this is going to work, there needs to be a hook, or in the case of barbarians, an axe. In fact, the first notion would be to replace the term “hook” with “axe” for obvious reasons. Make it so.

Terminology aside, in order to make a meme like this stick there needs to be more than just an, er, “axe”. There are qualities that barbarians have that can easily be shifted to fit the modern day. For example, the ninja is known for stealth and efficiency. That’s why the term “email ninja” can be applied to someone who is effective at processing their emails. Pirates of the digital persuasion are known for looting treasure of a different sort. The quality of the barbarian I think is a great springboard would be the berzerker-like nature that they possess. Let’s bring that quality into the present day…

Example: Mike was so passionate about usage-based billing that he went all barbarian on his most recent post.

See what I did there? I was able to apply the trait of a barbarian to the emotion behind my writing and plug my most recent post on my own site at the same time. Normally, that would be considered a sneaky maneuver, which are traits of both the ninja and the pirate. Yet because I made no attempt to conceal it whatsoever and was somewhat ruthless in doing so, I kind of pulled a barbarian there as well.

I can’t do this alone. I’ll need your help.

When you have the chance to go shirtless as part of your daily routine, do so. That’s what a barbarian would do.

When you have the choice of being quiet or loud when you’re about to take on a task or project, be loud and proud. That’s what a barbarian would do.

When you find yourself in the groove, instead of silently focusing so you can stay controlled and in the groove, shake things up. In fact, shake them until you break them. That’s what a barbarian would do.

So go forth and be a mendicant with me —- whatever that means.

Image Credit

Image courtesy of Yann_R @ Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 generic license.

Barbarians: The Character Meme of 2011 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

“Pixelated Peasants”: An Interview with Jonathan Salem Baskin is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

For our writer, a name is more than a collection of letters. It’s what you stand for — and what you’ll stand up for.

I don’t mean to contradict the Bard, but I think there is more to a name than just an arbitrary collection of letters that identify someone or something. I always have.

One of the most powerful – and valuable – lessons my parents ever gave me was on the importance of my name.

“Your good name is everything in this world,” they would say. “It can take a lifetime to build up, but only a moment to ruin.”

This is something I took to heart and that has guided me throughout my life.  It’s probably also no accident that I chose PR as a profession and now spend my working days guarding the good names of my clients.

The importance to me of my name was brought home one night recently when I received a private message from an acquaintance on Twitter.  He informed me I’d been “called out” in that week’s episode of a podcast that focuses on pop culture, technology and social media.

“What?” I wrote back. “What did I do?”

My acquaintance didn’t reply right away and so my brain began to spin scenarios in my head.  Had I done something wrong? Had I offended someone? Had my use of Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn been held up for ridicule?

What was going on?

(Side note: If you’re ever telling someone they’ve been slammed in public, it’s probably a good idea to give some context, if only to prevent possible cardiac arrest.)

That my mind leaped to my use of social media is interesting, but not surprising.  It’s the sphere in which my name is most public.  I am active on Twitter and Facebook, and interact daily with a wide range of people.  I am also careful about how I use social media, the image I project, and what I do with my good name online.  Of course, I’m not perfect.  I occasionally engage in the odd bit of whining or complaining, especially if I’ve gotten bad service. I can be quick with a witty or Smart Alec comeback that might be taken the wrong way. But, in general, I think I do OK, and the thought I’d been “called out” for something I’d done online upset me a great deal.

Since my acquaintance still wasn’t providing additional details, I DM’d friends on Twitter who I knew listened to the podcast. I also fired up my computer and downloaded the episode.

Within about 30 minutes I’d pieced together what happened.

The podcast has a Facebook page and, because I know someone involved with it, I “liked” it. At the start of the episode in question, one of the podcast’s main commentators – not my friend, who wasn’t there for that week’s show – decided to call out, at random, people who had liked the Facebook page but who had never joined the online chat during the live podcast. My name wasn’t alone. Several others were mentioned. The general tone was one of ridicule and insult.

OK, mystery solved. I wasn’t being called out for anything I’d done. Perversely, it was something I hadn’t done that sent my name spinning into cyberspace. Once I’d understood this, I calmed down – and then I got angry. Really, really angry. It took a couple of days for me to simmer down. I didn’t do anything overtly public about it, as I know that’s not the way to handle such things, but, privately, I was pretty outraged.

When I finally cooled off and could look rationally at my response, I realized why the situation had pushed my buttons. On the surface, I suppose you could say I was overreacting.  After all, I wasn’t being called out for something I had done.  And, yet, that was the point.  I hadn’t done anything to provoke the misuse of my name. All I’d done was like a Facebook page for a podcast – an act I’ve now remedied – and then chosen not to listen to it live.  That’s it. And, for that, my good name was called into question.

I believe that there are consequences for our actions. If I’ve done something wrong or offended someone, then, by all means, call me out for it (though, perhaps try a more private means of alerting me first). But to have my name abused when I hadn’t done anything to deserve it, that’s just not right.

It especially angered me to have my name misused online, where I’ve taken great pains to build up trust and relationships.  I meet many people online before I meet them in person – and so my online good name has become just as important as my in-person good name, if not more.  The fact that it was someone who only knows me online who alerted me to the situation in the first place only underscores this fact.  Even though I think he knows there’s more to me than this one situation, I will probably be forever associated in his mind with being called out in that podcast, and there’s not a darn thing I can do about it.

So, maybe I can’t take a joke. Maybe I overreacted. But, I don’t think so. I think it’s more that I know the power of having a good name – and the importance of respecting the good names of others.

Image Credit

“The Letter K-Kevin”

A Kevin by Any Other Name is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

How online activism can help us understand how real change is made.

By Mark Engler

The Internet is no substitute for person-to-person organizing. But it is a tool that can be used by activists.

And it is potentially a rather powerful tool.

This is the not-so-novel conclusion I presented recently when writing about “The Limits of Internet Organizing.” The piece was a follow-up on a much-discussed article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. I was generally sympathetic to Gladwell, but many others haven’t been. His article has sparked widespread conversation and criticism in many corners of the Internet.

Based on the discussions I’ve had with people on this topic, I think we need to clarify some terms. For those who believe that social movements are the bedrock of social change, it is important to come to some agreement about what “organizing” is.

When I am talking about organizing, I am referring to activity that mobilizes collective action around an issue with the goal of building popular power—the power of social movements and democratic constituencies, as opposed to that of established elites or moneyed interests. Ideally, as the word implies, organizing leaves behind some level of social movement organization.

I am not trying to reinvent the wheel here or make up some new, official definition. A basic tenet of understanding social movements is to distinguish the work of organizing from that of, say, social service. The two are different things. Likewise, there are lots of other pursuits that might count as “activism”—broadly understood as actions which engage a person in issues of public significance—that don’t fit into a narrower understanding of “organizing.”

Aaron Schutz offers a more in-depth discussion of what organizing is and isn’t in his “Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing” series at OpenLeft. Schutz operates within a pretty strict Alinskyite framework, so there are some movement-building activities that he does not count as “community organizing” that I would include within the scope of what I am addressing. But he makes some good general distinctions.

In short: giving out food at a soup kitchen is not organizing. Filing a lawsuit against a racist slumlord or an exploitative corporation is not organizing. Making environmentally conscious lifestyle choices is not organizing. Running for office is not organizing. And education or raising public awareness, in and of itself, is not organizing. These things might broadly be considered “activism,” but by themselves they do not produce social movements.

That is not to say that any of these are bad things. In some cases, they can be vital. Nor am I trying to be holier than thou on this point. As a writer, I would certainly not call myself an organizer. I hope that my work can be helpful to social movements and to those who are doing the rubber-meets-the-road work of building them, but my writing by itself is not doing that. Again, if you believe that such movements are the essential ingredient for progressive social change, it is important to make the distinction.

So how does the Internet fit into all this?

There’s obviously a lot of online activity (Facebook status updates, online petitions) that does not qualify as social movement organizing. To the extent that people believe these things are sufficient to produce social change, I think they are quite problematic. To the extent that people harness these activities in pursuit of actual organizing, I think they can be much more helpful.

Consider three examples that illustrate a range of online endeavors—and that show widely varying potentials.

First, there is the story in Gladwell’s article of how one person used Internet networking to retrieve a lost phone:

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teenager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan emailed the teenager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.

While there are some interesting aspects to this type of networking, Gladwell correctly notes that examples along these lines—“things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teenage girls”—do not represent social movement organizing that challenges status quo power relations.

A second, more promising, example: when I asked readers for their favorite online activist campaigns, several people mentioned to me the “It Gets Better” project. As many know, this project was launched recently by well-known writer and sex columnist Dan Savage as a response to the publicized rash of suicides among bullied gay youths. In the wake of one suicide, Savage wrote:

I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

Savage established a YouTube channel for the “It Gets Better” project and put up his own video message of hope. He encouraged others to submit. The result has been a remarkable video series in which adults reach out to queer teenagers who might otherwise feel targeted, vulnerable, and utterly without support.

I think the project is fantastic and that it effectively uses the Internet’s strengths. Is it organizing? No. It falls more into the category of outreach and education. But other people, inspired by the site, have launched the “Make It Better” project, designed to take things a step further and facilitate organizing around the issue.

A third example comes from Ted Nace, director of the CoalSwarm website. The CoalSwarm site documents and supports efforts around the country to close coal-fired power plants, which are leading sources of CO2 emissions. Nace has persuasively argued, in his book Climate Hope among other places, that Internet listserves and websites have done an important service in allowing organizations fighting specific plants to coordinate their efforts with others, gain resources and strategic insights, and overcome a sense of isolation in their work. Nace recently wrote me:

I worked in the anti-coal movement before the Internet. People in one part of the country had very little idea what was one going on in other places. Appalachian Voices’ project with Google Earth did a lot to show mountaintop removal to the world. Social media allowed decentralized anti-coal activists to connect across the country. It has cut the previous isolation that limited local groups, and it’s allowed much more information to get passed around than would ever have been possible “back in the day.”

The results of this Internet-aided organizing have been significant. Nace states, “By late 2009, following two years of intense mobilization, opponents had derailed at least 109 proposed plants, bringing the coal boom to a sputtering halt.”

At the same time that I find it exasperating to read a lot of high-tech boosters—especially those with roots in marketing and business management—spread hype about the world-shattering implications of the Internet for social change, I am genuinely excited to see savvy organizers get their hands on new tools and new technologies and come up with innovative campaigns. I look forward to profiling more of those in the future.

As a last thought, I believe Jamie McClelland, one of the tech whizzes over at the May First/PeopleLink collective, makes an interesting suggestion when he argues that the Internet is not merely a medium for activism, but that it is important enough that it should simultaneously be a subject for organizing. He supports shifting from the question of how we “should use the tools of the Internet” to a debate about questions like “what is our role in the development of Internet?” and “how do we support and develop the revolutionary potential in the Internet” in the face of efforts by corporations and governments to control and monitor how we operate on this new digital terrain?

It is a fair concern, and I hope that—as much as high technology—the tried and tested art of person-to-person organizing will be brought to bear in addressing it.

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Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com. This article first appeared in Dissent.

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Engler, M. (2010, October 28). Organizing in the Internet Age. Retrieved November 03, 2010, from YES! Magazine Web site: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/organizing-in-the-internet-age. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Organizing in the Internet Age is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

As Lorne Daniel discovers, amongst Twitter followers, “Verified” Tweeps tend to really stand out.

I am being followed by three real people. Or, to be more precise, three “Verified” people. These three have been Verified as being who they say they are, so I think it’s appropriate that I consider them real.

The unlikely trio of Margaret Atwood, Bif Naked and Chris Brogan are the only Verified people amongst my 800 and some Twitter followers.  You may know that Twitter assigns a little blue icon with a check mark in it to show that people are Verified. I’m not sure what kinds of proofs Twitter demands, but as with any online activity, one has to suspend any significant disbelief and go with it.

It’s likely that these three followers have never met one another. Perhaps, sometime, I could make introductions. “Peg, this is Bif. Bif, meet Chris. Chris – Margaret.”

Of course, I’m taking some liberties here. It’s not as if I even know these three. I’ve heard that Margaret Atwood’s nickname is Peg, but it’s over the top to pretend that I’m on a first name (let alone nickname) basis with Canada’s preeminent author.

I would stumble a bit, too, in introducing Bif Naked. Wikipedia tells me that her name is a reworking of her birth name Beth Torbet, so among friends, does she use Bif or Beth?

Chris Brogan, I am pretty sure, is just Chris Brogan. I’ve never met Chris, a hugely popular blogger and author specializing in social media. Likewise Bif Naked, an edgy song writer/ performer out of Vancouver (via Winnipeg, New Delhi and other points east).  I have at least been in the same room as Margaret Atwood, some decades ago, at a couple writers’ events and readings.

But not having met in person is typical of Twitter. I guesstimate that I have met about 100 of my followers and a handful are close friends. Yet it’s a bit of an artificial divide to start categorizing Twitter connections as real or unreal based on whether you have seen them in the flesh. All of them are real enough to me, or I wouldn’t be following them.

As is the case in face-to-face interactions, one allows a certain amount of wiggle room on Twitter for people’s adopted personas. An introvert like me might be able to pull off a little more of an extroverted front on Twitter. Someone who is not particularly quick-witted might appear more so, given time to conjure up his or her witticisms. Certainly, judging from the tweets I read, life on Twitter is a few degrees happier and bouncier than what I see out on the streets, in ‘real life.’

But in defense of social media posturing, what’s to say that we’re not all doing the same in our daily lives, behind the masks of our faces, clothes, cars and houses?

Some ‘tweeps’ may be totally unlike their online presence but, of the ones I have put to the test with an in-person meeting, the broad brush strokes of a person’s personality show through. You can pick up sincerity levels in 140 character tweets just as you do in fleeting moments of eye contact (or lack thereof).

So with both my followers and those I follow, the possibility of knowing them in person is not a necessary condition for followship. I follow a few Verified people — Steve Martin, Roger Ebert, Susan Orlean and Rosanne Cash. Frankly, however, I follow those four because they have demonstrated an uncommon mastery over those 140 (or less) characters that Twitter allows us.  If all the online Steve, Roger, Susan and Rosanne turned out to be charlatans I would still follow them.

I don’t expect people with tens or hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers to follow me back. As the whimsical Rosanne Cash tweeted recently, “If your ‘dream come true’ is for me to follow you on Twitter, you are aiming far too low. #AlsoPerversityPreventsMeFromObligingIfAsked”  Gotta love that perversity.

I do, however, feel honoured and a bit intimidated that Margaret Atwood, who is followed by 91,000 plus, but only follows 105, is now following me. That happened when I displayed a little bit of my own perversity. Twitter regularly posts a Suggestions: Who to Follow list on my profile page and in its wisdom Twitter’s algorithmic engineers kept suggesting I follow Atwood.

One day I sent out a tweet saying I wouldn’t be following Atwood until she followed me. You guessed right. Very shortly, the Verified Margaret Atwood showed up on my list of followers. Suddenly, I felt the need to up the intelligence quotient in my tweets.

So I’m under pressure not to let down my three Verified and very famous followers. Twit Pressure, you might call it. Which makes me think of Monty Python. Maybe we’re all just competing for Upper Class Twit of the Year, chasing each other around.

Watch Upper Class Twit of the Year…

Previously Published on www.lornedaniel.com on October 20, 2010

My, My, Look Who’s Following Me… is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN