Posts Tagged social media
Twitter, Writing, and the Darkness
Posted by annaldavis in Cyberculture, Writing on March 28, 2012
Since quitting Facebook I’ve been on a quest to find the right mix of social networking sites for my distractible writer’s brain. I’m on LinkedIn, Digg, and Stumbleupon. Now you can add Twitter to the mix. Here’s why I like it, in simile form.
Twitter is like…
…a NEWSROOM. I spent much of high school and college in journalism, some in the newsroom with the other contributors and some behind the editor’s desk. I preferred the newsroom. Digging up good stories, making the words fit together, yelling at each other across the desks trying to get the right spelling of a name – it’s all very exciting. But now I write from home, and occasionally from Starbucks. Great flexibility. Not-so-great for people like me who thrive professionally on deadlines and stimulation. With Twitter I can be as connected (or as quiet) as I would like. Very similar to the newsrooms I have known and loved.
… HAPPY HOUR. Every now and then someone gets a little crazy. Shop talk intermingles with personal opinion, the day’s professionalism gets lost in one reckless retweet. Sure, I guess Facebook offers the same sense of hair-down-loosened-tie networking, but in my experience Facebook is like happy hour in a bar that demands access to your underwear drawer in exchange for drinks. Twitter offers just the right balance – I can have a drink or two after work, talk about the day’s victories (or failures), pay my tab, and go home.
… CHURCH in LAS VEGAS. There’s a certain amount of street smarts required for Twitter. For example, beautiful tan women with dangly jewelry who show up in my follower list might not actually care about my tweets – they probably just want me to click on the porn site in their profile. I block those followers without clicking the link. (If there’s any question about where I stand on pornography, read this blog post titled Atheism and Pornography. In the interest of balanced journalistic practice, you can read the atheist rebuttal here.) But without Twitter, I would have never known that Frank Peretti was going to be in town promoting his new book Illusion. And he would have never autographed my 1986 edition of This Present Darkness. And I wouldn’t have watched Peretti turn a casual book-signing into an intimate, small group discussion about universalism, filmography, and what it was like to co-write with Ted Dekker.
So yeah, I think I like Twitter.
Got Ideas?
Posted by annaldavis in Cyberculture, Social Media on September 7, 2011
“Mass Idea Abortion Threatens Global Future.” That was my first title for this post. But during revision it seemed a bit dramatic and sensationalistic, like something we might read on the cover of a tabloid, right next to a photo of the three-headed alien in Lady Gaga’s dressing room.
Lady Gaga. Now there’s an original idea, right? We watched her hatch out of an egg, wear slabs of meat, and dress like a man in a temporary gender switch for the MTV Video Music Awards. I don’t know where I’ve seen anyone quite like her… oh, wait. I’m having flashbacks now. Yes… I think I remember something similar about some obscure pop star from the 80’s. Well, nevermind. I guess Lady Gaga isn’t so original after all.
Seriously, where are all the new ideas? Where’s the ingenuity? What happened to thinking outside the box (of commercialism, consumerism, you name it)?
Some say that we live in a “post-idea” world. It’s all been done, and you can read about it from any device with an internet connection. We are drowning in information, like those hoarders featured on A&E. We need help, and cloud-based service providers have a solution. The Cloud is like The Container Store for digital chaos.
But we’re only organizing it, storing it away in a virtual box. There’s no time (or desire) to process that information by actually thinking.
In an article titled “The Elusive Big Idea,” professor and journalist Neal Gabler wrote, “Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Who are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.”
Gabler goes on to explain that social networking sites play a big role in our mental laziness.
“It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, the most popular sites on the Web are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas,” Gabler said.
I like that wording: “the insatiable information hunger.” Reminds me of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. Yum… info. Need info now… CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
So what’s the big deal anyway? Who cares if we can’t think deeply for ourselves? What difference does it make that our collective minds overflow with the minor details of celebrity gossip and distant friends-of-a-friend-of-a-friend?
If you’re destined to remain the average American consumer, plodding through life from one new product to another, keeping track of the decades via TMZ, just hoping your retirement fund stays intact so you can quit work and watch Glee on a flatscreen, then no problem. But then again…
What if you actually have something original to offer? What if there’s an idea inside of you, something that can change even a corner of our world for the better, an idea whose time has come, ready to be hatched?
Oops, I almost forgot – Lady Gaga already did the hatching thing. Oh well. Guess I’ll just go read more about it online, maybe I’ll chat with my peeps and see what they thought of her latest recent photo shoot (did you hear? She didn’t wear any makeup! None at all! Can you believe it?).
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
(Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, civil rights advocate, international author / speaker, and ranked in the top ten of Gallup’s List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century.)
Three Must-Have Websites for Writers
Posted by annaldavis in Tips and Ideas, Writing on August 19, 2011
It’s a terrible time to be a writer. The publishing industry is in chaos, a large percentage of readers want cheap thrills and sensationalism, and there are more ways to waste time doing “research” than ever before. That’s why I’ve decided to get serious about which websites I frequent, and to choose these sites deliberately. Here are three types of websites that writers need to bookmark:
1. A favorite reference/search site. Today’s writer without a search engine is like last century’s writer without the telephone, dictionary, encyclopedia, library, and microfiche. My personal favorite is http://www.refdesk.com/, an all-in-one reference and search site run by Bob Drudge (father of Matt Drudge, of “Drudge Report” fame). I’ve been using Refdesk since I served as chief editor for my college paper in 1998.
Refdesk is free and supported entirely by donations, so there are no raunchy ads or annoying pop-ups. From the Refdesk Mission Statement, “The spirit of the original, non-commercial Internet guides Refdesk. This spirit envisions a living encyclopedia of information in the public domain, maintained by people who freely share their knowledge of where to find things on the Internet.”
If you’ve never used Refdesk, give it a try.
2. Google Maps. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, writers need a working knowledge of places mentioned in their text. If you’ve never tried this feature before, start by mapping your address. Zoom in. Switch to satellite view. Can you see your house? How accurate is the image? Try the street view. What does that look like? Now imagine being able to use this tool when writing about places and roads that aren’t as familiar. While there are some issues with Google Maps (dated images might not reflect newly constructed roads or buildings), it can be a great way to build descriptions into your writing that would otherwise require travel.
3. Social media, with intentionality. Sure, everyone and their dog (and sometimes even their unborn children) are on Facebook, but it’s not the only social networking site out there. Since quitting Facebook, I’ve been looking for great social media sites that match my needs. I’ve rediscovered my Linked-In account, which provides connectivity with fewer distractions. And so far I’m enjoying Stumbleupon, a “web content discovery engine.” I spend gobs of time surfing the web anyway, so why not turn that into an opportunity to connect with others?
