marramgrass

(See the first, second and third posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

This series is exploring a bit more widely than I intended. It was conceived when I started wondering about how ‘the media’ (including those that operate mainly offline) and other commentators place such emphasis on the internet as a venue, a forum and a significant influence on society. I began to wonder if this was all just a little bit closed, a little self-important and short-sighted — especially as I am someone who has been fascinated by technology and by online goings-on for years.

Technology has allowed me to have contact and conversation with many people who I would otherwise never be in touch with. I have learned from them, laughed with them, shared in the little corners of life they choose to share, and I hope to continue to do so. However, by far the most meaningful contact I have had online has been with those with whom I have some form of relationship in the real world. Previously I posted about my infatuation with Twitter — it’s most fun with the folks I know in real life.

Beyond that, though, what connection has all this with ‘real life’?

Every now and then you’ll meet someone who goes all misty-eyed and smiles in an unnerving way when they talk about the internet and the good it can do. Maybe it can’t do much good in itself, but access to information is generally a good thing, and when it comes to making info accessible you generally can’t do much better than the internet. Ish.

The question is availability. Broadband uptake in Northern Ireland is high (Alan in Belfast recently provided a deal of analysis of this), but there are still plenty of folks who, if they have internet access at home at all, rely on dial-up. Even for those with a high-speed connection, cable covers a small area and DSL is a fragile technology that needs you to be pretty close to your telephone exchange. And it does cost money.

Theoretically the network of public libraries provides internet access for all, but even if we accept that then there is still the issue of capacity. Just because I’m completely comfortable using the web to find out what I need to know, communicating by email and IM, doesn’t mean my gran is.

Of course, this has changed (progressed?), is changing and will change, as long as no-one slips through the gaps.

Useful (powerful?) as technologically advanced communications are, perhaps it’s best to remember that they are as well as rather than instead of everything else we already had and relied upon. I wonder, generally as well as from my own experience, if more and more people will find it takes a conscious effort to write a letter, pick up the phone, drop by and say “Hi” rather than send an email or a tweet, or leave a message on a Facebook wall?

That’s at an individual level. For society, I doubt that there’s any going back. Commerce, government, entertainment… the change has happened, and corporately nothing is the same. Just remember that ’society’ and ‘community’ aren’t necessarily the same thing, and what works on one level doesn’t always work on others.

(This post has been two-thirds written for a couple of weeks. I’ve just returned from a gathering and a conversation which has reminded me to progress it and publish it — see the first and second posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

Several years ago I began to wonder about online expressions of community. I was young(er) and full of fire, and I believed that it was real and it was good. I remember sitting in a bar having lunch with an older and wiser colleague, trying desperately to convince him of the potential in ‘online church’. I think the only thing I convinced him of was a slight softness in my head. That was then.

Now, with all these ‘online communities’ and ’social’ sites springing up all over the web, I have to ask: is ‘community’ the correct word? Whereas once I would have shouted my ‘yes’, now I’m really not so sure.

While I am wary of overusing dictionary definitions in this kind of discussion, I’ll let dictionary.com provide the following perspectives:

A social group of any size where members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.

A social, religious, occupational or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (”the [...] community”).

the public; society.

A group of organisms or populations living and interacting with one another in a particular environment.

From those definitions, maybe not.

Given the constantly changing and developing nature of language, perhaps ‘community’ is becoming the right word, but for now I’m not really comfortable with using the same term I could easily apply to our family, our church, a street, a neighbourhood.

But since this technology facilitates communication, I suppose it could be moving us in that kind of direction.

What about that communication?

It’s an inherently different thing to sit and have a face to face conversation with a friend, perhaps over a good meal, than to talk on the telephone. The phone is a different experience again from a hand-written letter, which differs from a typed letter. All are some way from an email.

I’d suggest that at least some of the difference is down to decreasing levels of direct physical presence in/through the medium. At one end of the spectrum we can experience the full range of nuance and meaning, while at the other end there is nothing that is ever directly encountered by both parties — electrons are transmitted and translated until beams of light take over…

How often have you been party to a major misunderstanding of an email sent or received? It happens regularly, to me and to people I know.

Technology has given us myriad tools and venues for sharing and transmitting information, with increasing volume and efficiency. The one that has caught my eye recently is Twitter. I didn’t get it at first, but when I discovered a couple of friends were using it I decided to give it a try. I was quickly hooked. (You can maybe get some idea by browsing over my Twitter stream.) Based simply in keeping communication open between people, even in a micro-broadcasting or micro-blogging kind of way, it’s fun, entertaining, cute and very occasionally useful.

What Twitter isn’t, I think, is substantial or meaningful. It’s more of a “because I can” sort of thing, and a good example because of how it encourages quantity over quality of communication. In a world beset by measures and targets, it’s easy to forget that neither volume nor efficiency are necessarily the thing.

Community is formed out of relationships, which are in turn based on communication. The quality of each affects the others.

I’ll be returning to these twin questions of communication and community.

(See the first post in this series for what I’m doing.)

As I’ve been thinking about the interactions that take place online, in my mind they’ve fallen into two broad categories based on ‘venue’:

• Centralised, if not necessarily in a technological sense, where the interactions take place through a specific website, newsgroup, mailing list or similar.
• Decentralised, in the manner of separate blogs forming an organic network.

Within these groups I find that that there is variation as to what brings them together.

Centralised Venues.

Networks and groupings can form on the basis of:

• Shared interest or purpose, for example a discussion forum or mailing list focussed on a particular subject. I have participated in groups discussing technology of various flavours, youth ministry, theology, particular authors, photography and even the collection and use of fountain pens. This sort of group can be an excellent source of information.
• Shared experience, for example Friends Reunited, or the way many use Facebook — “we went to school together.”
• Shared presence — stumbling into people you have never and may never have otherwise met. In my short experience this is the way MySpace seemed largely to operate.

All these factors reflect processes that occur in the real world, where we physically meet different people in all kinds of different contexts.

Decentralised Venues.

Where I find it more difficult to draw a real-world parallel is in the ‘blogosphere‘.

Anyone (with the necessary resources) can publish a website, and can interact with what anyone else has published either through direct communication (public or private) or by responding back on their own site. Networks of individuals gather around particular conversations, but can also easily draw in others who have some other incidental interest or curiosity. It’s fascinating (to me at least) to click around various blogs and follow the lines of who links to who, and who participates where — and you can participate in the wider network to as large or as small a degree as you like.

There are strengths and weaknesses in each of these forms of network, and they all intermingle anyway, connecting and overlapping through the individuals involved. I suppose it’s called the ‘web’ for a reason :-) You probably could map it, but it would get very complicated very quickly.

So far I’ve deliberately avoided using the word ‘community’, even though it has threatened to roll out by itself. I’m wary of applying that name to what goes on online, but it’s a question that needs asked:

Is this ‘community’?

That’s for the next post in this series.

This is another one of those posts that many regular readers will want to skip on past. It’s nerdy, and only interesting in a very specialised way :-)
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(Please forgive the poor pun — sometimes I can’t help it.)

It seems like over the last year or two everyone paying attention to the web has been talking about social networking sites. The chat in the press started with the Arctic Monkeys, and then somewhere down the line Microsoft paid a fortune for a tiny bit of Facebook.

There is something inherently social about the internet. It’s a medium all about the transmission of information, and that information has to come from somewhere (and go to somewhere).

All over the world there are people writing, publishing, singing, dancing, talking, and there are plenty of people reading, watching and listening to them. I’ve been writing this blog for a bit over five years now, pretty much just for the hell of it; there are even a surprising number of people who drop by here regularly, don’t ask me why. The power of the internet: although I haven’t seen the complete works of Shakespeare materialize just yet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the implications of all this and I thought it would be interesting, for me at least, to chart my own engagement with the social aspects of internet use.

When I was a teenager my parents stuck a PC in the living room with a 56k modem that introduced me to email. That was pretty much all I used it for. The same people I saw every day, talked to on the phone regularly, we emailed each other too.

Once I moved to Scotland, email became a more important way of keeping in touch with people. I also began to discover how much information there was out there on the web — and its great potential as an aid to procrastination.

Since then, this is the journey I have taken through various online interactions:

• Fora and newsgroups. Discussions, theoretically based around a particular subject area.
• Instant Messengers (MSN et al.). Like a phone call, only slower :-)
• Friends Reunited. Feeds the gossip in us, or it did the last time I went near it.
• Flickr. A mix of photos and fora.
• MySpace. Maybe a year or two ago I followed a bunch of friends to MySpace. You can probably count on two hands the total number of times I’ve logged into my account there.
• Bebo. I have an account, and I’ve literally never done anything with it beyond signing up.
• Facebook. More recent, a similar story as MySpace except you can probably do the counting on one hand.
• Twitter. Tough to describe. I was initially very skeptical, but there’s something compelling about it.

Alongside this there are all the blogs out there (like this one). It’s not a formal network built around one specific site. Instead readers and authors link to each other, communicate through comments, emails and other posts. Some of those I follow are linked in the sidebar over there; I still haven’t got round to making it a more complete list.

After all that, though, I’m left with some questions:

• What’s the point of it all?
• What’s the use of it all?
• What constitutes quality, genuine interaction and communication?
• Does it matter ‘in real life’?
• Where can we take it?

In the car this morning I was listening to an interview with Tony Jones (of Emergent Village) where he said:

I just don’t think we can overstate how important the internet is in reshaping the social structure of our society. It’s an egalitarian force…

Is this true?

I may have a few thoughts and ideas, but I’ve formed no conclusions yet. This short series of posts is by way of me thinking out loud, so please do chip in.

Back in September I mentioned that I was giving Google Reader another go in case I ended up with an iPhone in my pocket.

Four and a half months later, it appears to have become my feed reader of choice. Since the first time I tried it out, way back when it became available, Reader has been developed into a much slicker and more usable piece of software, and it seems to have successfully weaned me off my desktop feed reader (on Windows I was a lover of FeedDemon in the days before it was eaten by NewsGator, then I discovered Thunderbird’s abilities in the field and brought it with me to the Mac).

Before we go any further, an interlude:
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Time for an article-type thing that I’ve had stewing in my mind for a couple weeks. It’s very computer-y, but if you use a computer for anything at all, pretty much, then it may be worth reading. It largely deals with Mac-based solutions and software, but those that aren’t specifically available for Windows will have something very similar out there. I’m not joking, this could save you a whole pile of heartache and frustration.

Everyone who uses a computer knows you should regularly and reliably back up your hard disk, especially with all the music and the sentimentally valuable photos we all have lying around these days. Between the desktop computer and this laptop, I’ve got about 60 GB of photos (some of which could be replaced with some hard work, many of which couldn’t), maybe 30 or 40 GB of music files (all legitimate, I might add), and several GB of other stuff, include some critical work files that I really can’t lose.

What if my hard disk decides to throw a wobbly? Or the PC explodes? Or my laptop gets half-inched? That’d be bad.

Which is why backup is a good idea — taking copies of your data in case you lose the working copies/originals. For advice all should read, check out The Tao of Backup.

I’m already fairly good about taking clones of hard disks regularly. I’m seeking an additional solution, possibly an online one. Being in an unusually methodical mood, and having other more responsible things to be distracted from, I decided to have a good look at the available options.

Why online?

Here I’m not talking about full-system backups. There is no sensible substitute for using reliable software to take a file-by-file clone of your hard disk (the Leopard-ready update to SuperDuper! has been released today as I work on this). Twice, and then store them seperately. Backing up gigs and gigs of data online is never going to work while those of us lucky enough to have broadband are sitting at the base of a dinky little 256 kbps upstream (the A in ADSL means ‘asynchronous’, which is to say you receive data much, much more quickly than you can send it).

What I’m after is a redundant way to conveniently backup maybe a few hundred megabytes of data (a couple of GB, tops), largely work-related stuff I really can’t lose, to somewhere it will be safe if I suffer a local catastrophe. For this, I have a suspicion online storage may be the way to go.

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• Winter seems to have finally arrived here in Northern Ireland. We had a couple of excellently cold days, and now it’s just wet. That is the true heart of winter in this part of the world. One of the things I miss about Edinburgh is how it could get properly cold, and even snow occasionally.
• In spite of my intentions otherwise, as Christmas gets closer I only seem to get busier. It seems like I could do with it being eight weeks away instead of four. It’s probably about time I learned some time-management. That or employed a ghost-writer, along with a ghost-facilitator, ghost-trainer and ghost-student… Less than four weeks to a wee break is great and terrible both at once. And I’m horrified that the Advent has become a countdown to holiday, at least on some level.
• The iPhone interface is not hugely well-suited to inputting HTML. Finding the < and > symbols takes too many actions, and the auto-correct gets occasionally flummoxed by the tags. Yet strangely it seems quite happy with ‘flummoxed’. Still, it gives me something to do when I’m waiting on my wife and I’ve forgotten my novel.

What is it with me and Google lately?

Just a quick one, here. When posting yesterday I needed to find my old post about jPod, and dredged up from the back of my mind a little bit of Google functionality that I’ve never used but is handy to know about.

To get the “one search engine to rule them all” to search a specific web site, just sart your search string with the name of the site preceded by “site:”. So yesterday I used the search site:marramgrass.org.uk jpod to find my old post.

Not at all exciting, but occasionally quite useful.

Or, “How Google Is Taking Over The World.”

Over the last eight or nine years, I’ve become at home with two artifacts of modern life which are at the same time constant (in certain societies) and fleeting: email addresses and mobile phone numbers.

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