The impossibility of popularity

So, um. Regular posting seems not to be my thing. Still, there's nothing like delayed gratification.

In case you hadn't noticed, Facebook are messing with privacy settings again. It seems the tendency of social networks is to start with a brief free for all, when everything and everyone's information is up for grabs, then as time goes on, people voluntarily find their comfort level and walls go up. This isn't, or shouldn't be news. Anthropology and pop sociology books (see Desmond Morris & Malcolm Gladwell) all talk about the natural human tendency to separate into groups based on common purposes (and the maximum number of people we can adequately process on a day-to-day level). I don't know how many friends I have on Facebook - more than 100, I think - but the number in no way correlates to the amount of people I interact with in real life during a given month. I don't even communicate with a third of these people online either, nor am I likely to.

You aren't either. We join these networks for two reasons: 1. Everyone else is doing it and we have to find dinner party conversation somewhere; 2. We want to know exactly what all those people we met in the past look like and what they're doing now. It's great, like going to a class reunion in disguise. You can sate your stalkerish nostalgia muscle without actually having a forced conversation about stuff you wanted to put behind you years ago, or navigate the tricky waters of 'what are you up to these days?'.

But that only takes you so far. You found out how successful or not your exes, childhood friends and schoolyard enemies are, how many children have turned up, who has expanded horizontally and the many curious ways male pattern baldness occurs. Then you're done. Maybe you reconnect with some people, but mostly your reward is endless status updates, from people you don't actually know and an unending stream of Farmville invitations. So you start to filter your news feed. I cannot stress how fabulous this feature is.

I'm digressing. The point is, as we spend more time on these networks we inevitably progressively close off access to others and ourselves. Most of the time we don't even notice. I've only discovered (as I type) that a number of people I friended around the time I joined Facebook have defriended me. I'm crushed, as you can imagine. I'm wondering, as an experiment, how long would it take most of my friends' list to notice if I did the same. With a few exceptions, I doubt there would be a very large amount. Outside our immediate circle, your 300 friends are meaningless. You don't see them. You couldn't even list all their names off the top of your head. Some you haven't seen for years and are unlikely ever to clap eyes on again.

But this doesn't help Facebook. They need the network to remain open, for lots of reasons. Here are a few:

1. Facebook has already been the top dog for around 3 years. In social network terms, this is like the entire Cretaceous period. MySpace is already a fossil being dug up by the IT equivalent of Mary Anning. They need to keep at least the illusion of openness to compete with Twitter and whatever is coming after.

2. Advertisers like large, unsplintered audiences. It reminds them of the heady days of two-channel TV and 'event television'. Keeping consumer information available is good for their business, and hence for Facebook.

3. Voyeurism. Sooner or later, people will start going through their privacy settings and tighten everything up, but until then it's frontier country.

So, hmmm. I don't know. I've been flirting with leaving the site for a while now - it's a massive timesink and I'm pretty sure I can contact everyone I'm actually friends with, but like every other insecure freelancer, I'm afraid to leave the party first. Just as long as I'm not the last.

Very quickly - talking about Facebook and Twitter reminds me of a personal bugbear. If I want to talk to someone or seek their advice, I will contact them personally and do so, in much the same way as if I want to go for a pint with my friend I won't inscribe it on a sandwich board and walk up and down Grafton Street until he sees it. Equally I don't react well to seeing it done by others. People can do what they like, but I fail to see how it is in any way productive. This thought is brought to you by the ever perceptive Merlin Mann, who, apart from having a terrific name (I wanted to call one of my boys Merlin, but was dissuaded. It would have been so cool. Oh well) has a knack for explaining this sort of thing very well. Go follow him.

Facebook and Twitter are great fun. I spent a gloriously unproductive hour yesterday looking at the profile pictures of people I went to school with twenty-plus years ago (because I calculated they would not realise their locked profiles were no longer so. Elementary, my dear Watson). But thumbnail pics and pithy status updates aren't people. Real friends are the ones you eat food with, go for pints with, argue about music, lend books to and who are your lifetime audience as you are theirs (if you're very lucky, and everyone should have a measure of that luck).

Right. Better go and do some paying work now.

Only Fools and SEO Operatives

I used to work, to some degree, in IT, running an e-commerce website. It was one of those jobs where you end up doing a bit of everything, for cost and time reasons. Good fun, and I like to think I did it well, but finding any jobs in that sector without lots of specific experience in one area has proved difficult, to say the least. The age of the enthusiastic amateur is over, when it comes to jobs in the Irish web sector at least. Which is a pity, because I like food and shelter.

One web area that I've noticed continues to be a big deal is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, for those of you mercifully ignorant of the jargon. SEO operatives (a hopeful noun, if ever there was one) are in the business of helping your site rise up the search rankings, thus making you rich beyond your wildest dreams...

Most businesses looking to get online have no real understanding of what SEO is, so an 'operative' can more or less tell them any old thing. It's the 1920's seance of modern advertising. To sell your SEO skills is to imply that you can game the system in such a way that your clients can outwit Google, Bing and Yahoo. You can't. It's a fiction that people want to believe, and are happy to pay for, even now, it seems. It's incredibly hard to trick Google. If, somehow, you do (far easier six years ago than now), it will discover the trick and punish you. There are many hundreds of clever people at Google, working every day to make it harder to outwit the system. Which also begs the question: what is the point of pursuing such a strategy? The time necessary to outthink Google is time taken away from making your site worth visiting in the first place and you'll forever be like Trotsky, wandering the internet with one eye over your shoulder, wondering when the ice pick is going to descend.

All this occurred to me as I read this great post, which I heartily recommend if for some tragic reason, you find yourself anywhere near this world, or heaven help you, are presented with an SEO report.

If you want to have a site people go to, you must do the following:

1. Make a good site

2. Format it correctly

3. Submit relevant keywords

4. Keep generating content

5. Try not to be evil

- Please do bear in mind that should we meet and I announce I too, am now a SEO operative, all this was youthful exuberance and not to be taken seriously...

Bit of autobiography before dinner

I remember, when I was about eleven I was in my friend Barry's house. Barry was a year or so older than me and was therefore that much closer to the bleeding edge of cool than I was. Also, he'd grown up in Pittsburgh until a couple of years before. I had no real conception of that place, but it was in America, so he was cool. Another reason for that was his collection of stuff. In every group I was ever a part of, there was one kid who always had every important product - the best Action Man, a Millennium Falcon, a ZX Spectrum (maybe not so much the last thing) - Barry was one of those guys. Poor guy didn't know many people, having only recently arrived in Ireland, which worked out fine for me.

We were on the cusp of things then (the embarrassing cusp, not any of the good ones), and lots of grown-up ideas started to emerge in a haphazard way, like a drunk explaining Wittgenstein. We didn't know any girls and were too small a group to play any sports, so we drifted to the other teenage one-upmanship game: music.

Barry had been given a ghetto blaster (even then that title was a little anachronistic, but from my point of view 'blaster' = Han Solo's gun, so it worked in a strange kind of way) for Christmas, I think. it was one of those designs that were umbilically linked to their time and place, like that TV in the shape of a motorbike helmet that I used to lust after in Switzers. It looked like it had been fashioned from leftover Ferrari parts. I bet some hipster is even now bidding well over €500 for it on Ebay.

What a lead in. Anyway, we were 'into' music, by which I mean Barry had money and could buy albums, while I had blank cassettes and would copy them off him. This is how I first heard Nirvana, The Simpsons album, Tone Loc's Wild Thing, Snow's Informer, and Vanilla Ice. I was eclectic even then. It was the best sort of relationship for this sort of thing - we both got something out of it: Barry got to be the gatekeeper to cool things, which made him cool; I got lots of free music. It wasn't all that different to collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards or birdwatching, except you could imagine not being laughed at or beaten up for doing it.

Having music always used to be a competitive sport. I think cassettes were the mobile phones of 1989, if you were a preteen. In sixth class, one kid whose name I have long forgotten leapt up the social ladder when he brought in a copy of Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. This may be the only time in recorded history that be-permed men in leather trousers could be described as aspirational. It didn't last, sadly. A year later, certain older brothers passed Appetite For Destruction down to their siblings in my class. From that point we also experienced the phenomenon of revisionist history. It was like the opposite of Woodstock. Everyone who claims not to remember it was there.

Music functioned as a social measure in another way. Everything you do as a teenager is geared towards being accepted by your chosen group, not being bothered by everyone else and hopefully, getting together with someone of your chosen sex. If you were good at managing that, congratulations. Don't trip and fall on anything sharp on your way out. Knowing about music (as long as you were careful to know about the right sort - don't discuss Dr. Alban with a guy in a Jane's Addiction t-shirt) was an infinitely more socially acceptable excuse for being otherwise monosyllabic and gauche, than having a comprehensive understanding of Dungeons & Dragons (oh, happy days) or just being crap at sports. If you were rubbish at interaction:

EXAMPLE 1

ATTRACTIVE HUMAN OF PREFERRED PERSUASION: "Hi."

YOU: (Panic behind eyes. Sweat glands activate. Brain leaves through back door) "Hey." (directed at shoes. Own shoes) "Er." (Dives into box of umbrellas)

AHofPP: " ."

So, as you might imagine, AHofPP's reaction would run the gamut from 'Huh?" to "Weirdo". But if you were wearing a Hole/Pixies/Rage Against The Machine/Smashing Pumpkins/Sonic Youth (I'm a creature of my time) t-shirt while you had your social meltdown, then at least you were a nerd in a good way (you hoped). It was also a great way to get into social groups:

EXAMPLE 2

TALLER/BETTER LOOKING/MORE JADED PEER: "Hey. Cool t-shirt."

YOU: "Oh yeah. Thanks man."

TBLMJP: "Yeah, 4 Non Blondes are wicked. Really into them."

Even in college, music was a really handy shorthand for figuring out if someone was on your wavelength, whether they would sleep with you, if their friends might, or if they could introduce you to someone who might sleep with you. It's probably the only time in my life when having an in-depth knowledge of Radiohead B-sides could be described as a pulling tool. Not a great one, mind you.

EXAMPLE 3

PERSON YOU ARE SCORING/VICTIM: "You're really cute."

YOU: "You too. This is like that song, No Surprises. Hang on, I'll put it on. How do you work this CD player?"

The funny thing about having kids about a decade before anyone else your age even considers the idea is that suddenly you have a real timetable. Not like the sort with lectures. You didn't need to change lecturers' nappies, or make sure they didn't drink all the cough medicine. Not every week, anyway. One of the casualties of kids for us was music. The sort of commitment necessary to be on top of what's going on in music was, at least in our house, incompatible with being broke and in charge of an infant.

Becoming deeply uncool from a musical point of view is expected when you grow up and get married. If you're tracking the newest and most adventurous music, you probably don't spend too much time in deepest suburbia.

I'm just really glad I discovered cookery books. Now I can be obsessive about Jamie, Nigel, Rick, Madhur, Nigella, Tamsin, Valentine and the Hairy Bikers. Plus, no matter how out of touch I become, at least I'll enjoy the food.

- Hope that made some sort of sense. Not convinced it did. For everyone studying creative writing, this is what happens when you sit down with a glass of wine and no outline and think "I'll figure something out". I'll write something desperately clever sooner or later, so please do come back.

As a quick aside, I'm now back to being eleven and getting my musical cues from other people. Everything I have listened to in the last three years (at least) has been a result of listening to other friends or (more often) by peeking at their collections. Let's hear it for Facebook. Here are some of the things I've enjoyed over the past while (that have been recommended, innit):

Fear And Loathing In Lisbon

It's been a while since I've written anything of length on this blog. I've been thinking about the Lisbon referendum again lately, because for me it coalesces a number of thoughts I have had about politics and how information is communicated.

For anyone not reading this in Ireland, we had a referendum earlier this year to decide whether we as a state wished to sign up to the particulars of the Lisbon Treaty. Without getting into the for and against arguments, the treaty aims to further cement the EU as a federal body, makes the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding within member states and generally speaking brings each country closer to singing from the same hymn sheet. As you can imagine, there are those who think this is a good thing, citing the value of cooperation and that in a world with immense superpowers like the US, China and Russia, the whole of Europe is greater than its component parts. On the other hand, there are those who see more than a shadow of the totalitarian state, or less hysterically, a gradual transferral of individual power (& hence, liberty) to a central organisation. Effectively, it's the big tent approach versus the small government (or libertarian) thesis.

The reason we are having these referendums at all (not every country in the EU does) stems from Crotty versus An Taoiseach in 1987. This resulted in a supreme court ruling that forces the government to ask permission for any significant change to Ireland/EEC (EU as was) treaties, since such alterations would be in effect amendments to the Constitution, that wily document crafted by Dev while the rest of the world was looking west at the National Socialists in 1937. With me so far? If you've ever been to a parent-teacher meeting, a union meeting, or any get together that invites a mass discussion, you may already expect what happens in such cases. Any issue, no matter how general, becomes deconstructed in an ever-expanding sea of minutiae, like cells in a petri dish. So for the 'No' camp, the Lisbon referendum can be about any number of tangential objections that exist on placards, cheerfully removed from context. Signing up means reduced power, increased military presence, abortion, divorce, immigrants, the death knell for Irish farming. Here's Libertas's current poster:

Look at the language of the poster. "Irish Democracy 1916-2009? Vote No!"; the sun, disappearing into dark clouds that rise up from the bottom of the picture; in the foreground an authentic-looking Irish child with startling green eyes and (of course) red hair. This is designed to do two things at once: stir a patriotic sense of pride for the mother country, and to be a call to action, invoking, with 1916, the be-pedestaled martyrs for freedom, and connecting a vote against this treaty as a continuation of those earlier actions.

How about the 'yes' vote? In Ireland, it is supported by all the major political parties. This doesn't necessarily mean automatic success. It was the same in the previous referendum and it didn't end well there either. The yes camp has two problems that don't trouble the no campaigners. First, most people don't really understand what the treaty is or what it implies. Whether because the treaty itself is a typically arcane legal document, or that our media has failed to communicate the gist of it effectively, most people have wildly differing ideas of what it means. So you have a situation where the truth belongs to he who shouts loudest. Last time it was Libertas and Sinn Fein. This time, more sinister groups such as Coir have added their voice.

Second, the yes campaigners suffer from being the captains of the Titanic. Ireland, though we style ourselves irreverent and rejoice in the narrative of the Rising and nationalism (700 years and all that) is, more so than Britain, a nation of shopkeepers.

We more or less invented the idea of ourselves as Celtic firebrands. Our national sports and dance are largely a construct of the Gaelic League, a movement that took inspiration from the Belle Époque in France, in an attempt to radicalise a population that was not nearly as desperate to leave the United Kingdom as later thinkers would have it. Our political parties all sit on more or less the same fence, right in the middle, leaning right or left as the wind blows. So we can have a centre right party that has been in power uninterrupted (barring a three-year gap) since 1989. This party can go into coalitions with other political persuasions with barely a shift in the direction of the ship - in fact, most coalition partners emerge very much the worse for the experience, while Fianna Fail sails on into another glorious sunset. We like stability. For years one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Europe, we prefer today to be as yesterday and tomorrow to be more of the same.

The problem for the government is that the weather forecasts are gloomier day by day. Allegations of cronyism and corruption were dismissed in years past, since everything was going well, but not anymore. Suddenly the years of being in power are not indications of trustworthiness and reliability, but Exhibit A in the trial of the driver who was asleep at the wheel. The current strategy for rescuing Ireland from the recession, being a variant on 'rob the poor to feed the rich' as far as many people are concerned, contributes to a confidence meltdown when it comes to trusting their advice on the election. Even the opposition parties who are for the election have similar problems.

So how do they convince us? They can't scare us, although there is the odd half-hearted effort:

As it is, support for the yes camp appears to be (tentatively) the majority view. In the light of their failure in the local elections, which is likely to have been the largest shift in Irish voter loyalties for some time to come, Libertas and Sinn Fein may have to resign themselves to being the lone voice at the dinner party, or the crank at the bar. They can win, sometimes, on specific issues and they can count on a certain bed of support (as can any party), but mass support thus far eludes them, because for better or worse, we are not a country of ideologies, but a collection of stories, some true, some almost true, but always - always - regular and timetabled.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes this Friday. By all means comment and tell me how wrong I am about any of this. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this video, which you may find instructive, given the eleventh commandment: Thou Shall Not Question Stephen Fry.

Actually a much longer post than I meant to write

I haven't been very regular so far with this blog, and probably won't be for a while as I'm spending most of my time trying to get freelance work or feeling down about not getting freelance work. It seems to me that there are two types of blog, generally speaking (and very possibly two kinds of journalism): the 'I feel' and the 'I do'. The 'I feel' sort is potentially great, but there are a whole lot of shortcomings. Many blogs that I read are all about how the writer feels about something, so the drama, the narrative becomes about how that person feels about the things that they are doing or not doing, and rarely the things themselves.

Alternately, the 'I do' blogs are: this happened, then this, then I did that, now I'm doing this and later I'm going to do something else as well. There's not a whole lot of room for 'I did this and here's a thought about how it feels to be me doing this', if you take my meaning. Someone who cleaves very closely to this is Malcolm Gladwell, who writes some books that I love very much, and who has always stressed that he is not in the business of telling you what he feels about the work that he does, or indeed, his life.

Your preference will likely suggest a number of things about what you want from a story. Maybe you like to be educated, to find out something new, to get the inside skinny as it were. So you read news reports, self-help books, academic treatises, textbooks, all that stuff - I know this is a little unfair, but let's help the nice blogger make his point. Whereas if you like 'I feel' more, you read celebrity magazines, gossip columns, columns, novels, autobiographies.

Of course, few people are one or the other. More importantly, the successful story must have both. When I was small, during the early Eighties, my father was an entrepreneur. He ran his own company and he liked computers, spending most of his free time (when not hanging out with us) teaching himself how to program, back in the days of the command line, when Basic and Pascal and C were kings. We had one of the first two IBM PC's in Ireland, apparently, which always makes me think that if only I had been anyway talented at it I would now be making lots of money. I would have gotten that interview at Google, for a start...

So anyway, my dad liked to learn about new things (and still does, I'm not building up to some horrible tragedy) but he always liked a good story. Being as it was the 80's and given that he was an entrepreneur, there were a lot of business strategy books about. The one I always remember was Lee Iacocca's "Iacocca: An Autobiography" (I was fascinated by the name and used to pronounce it in my head endlessly because I was and am strange). Iacocca was very successful in the US car business and his book was the best-selling nonfiction book of 1984 and 1985 (according to Wikipedia). I've never read it, but I think it offers a good example of how you can do both. Iacocca spent the first third of his book talking about where he came from - his early life and family, education, et cetera. Then he proceeds to his time in business and the successes and misfortunes that he experienced, bringing the reader up to the present day.

Iacocca's book was popular first because he was a great success in business: then as now, there are lots of people who want to do likewise and by reading his autobiography, they too could tease out some of the strategies he took to get there and perhaps apply them to their own life. But Iacocca also talked about his life and the context for these great financial achievements, which I suspect made the book more readable and ultimately more profitable than had he written Iacocca's Eight Rules For Financial Success.

Gladwell, that great believer in 'I do' journalism also uses this technique, most recently in Outliers, his book on success. In almost every story he tells, Gladwell relies on how people feel about things to illustrate how they do them and so succeed or not. In one particularly affecting section, he discusses the smartest man in America (according to that ever so reliable measure, IQ) and how his achievements in life seem to fall so far short of what we expect from the gifted. I won't spoil the story as it's worth reading and in any case is better told by Gladwell than the likes of me, but what is interesting is that we come to any realisation and understanding, to Gladwell's larger point about intelligence and success, through the life story and feelings of that smart man. Gladwell could have told the story in a paragraph, but he takes a chapter. The time this takes means that you immerse yourself more fully in the story (and from that, the ideas) than you ever would were you presented with a bullet-point list of the reasons why some gifted people don't achieve their supposed potential.

It works both ways. If you read books even semi-regularly, you are aware that there is a thing called 'literary fiction', and then everything else. If you are reading something from 'everything else' you are not necessarily reading a proper book. You may be enjoying it, you may even love it, but you aren't appreciating real literary art in the same way you might were you to approach the foot of Mount Banville or scale the Cliffs of McEwan. Without starting a rant about the meaninglessness of these divisions and the consequences apparent for publishing and reading in general, the main complaint about literary novels, insofar as there are any, is that 'there is no story'. People feel all the time. There are acres of feelings in these books. There are thoughts deep and shallow, honourable and prurient, affecting and bland, but rarely is there a story to hang them on, to give them resonance.

It's hard to do. I recently read a first novel called 'John The Revelator' by a guy called Peter Murphy, who writes for Hot Press (I should declare an interest here: I'd like to be published, so I automatically hate everyone else who is, especially those who are recently published and who are friends of friends. It's a failing, what can I say. Declaration over). On one level, it's a classic lit novel, filled with symbolism and philosophical ramblings, alienation, loss and as they say in the best reviews, 'not much happens'. On the other hand, it's incredibly gripping and I read it in about 4 hours. The 'not much' that happens is actually all that the author needs to make his story work and help the characters who appear in it both real and interesting. More than that, both work together to help each other. Since the characters are so compelling, the story becomes that way too. The story has a strangeness of atmosphere that works on the characters to make something that on the face of it, you could tell in one page, a novel that sucks you in and rewards you for your time.

As you can imagine, I profoundly dislike the guy...

We've left the point. This is all a way of saying that I'm obsessed with Ira Glass and I think everyone should listen to his show, This American Life, on NPR in the US, but downloadable as a free podcast. He did a speech for something called the Gel Conference in 2007 (I can't be bothered findoing out what that is right now), which I link to here and I think (if you've read this far) you might enjoy. He talks about what he feels makes a story work and why that is the case. So from the perspective of aspirant writers, this may be worth a watch, but I think that it's a good view anyway.


via videosift.com

I don't know if that link is going to work, but here is a link to another series he did on storytelling that I enjoyed. There's a YouTube link out there somewhere as well...

Here's part 1.

So that link to Ira Glass, that mini-review of John The Revelator and indeed that digression on Lee Iacocca, my dad and Malcolm Gladwell amount to a declaration of intent for this blog (which hopefully hits the right balance of pretentiousness and humour), that while I will endeavour to write things that I do (posting articles that I have done and so forth) and talk about news that is relevant and interesting, there will always be lots of thoughts about everything, because I think that will make the stories and the blog more interesting. Whether you agree or not is up to you and you have my apologies, as ever.