Text and Hubris

So I have an account on Facebook. I use it as a way to check on the activities of the Iowa Youth Writing Project and on those around me who still use Facebook as their primary method of communication. Otherwise, the site is useless to me. Its value as a locus of people and eyes is diminished by the fact that everything I say and do is fed back into the machine. I pay for Facebook not in cash but in information. I pay by selling my words, my interests and my friends. Personally, I think that price is far too high. Beyond that, the company has repeatedly sacrificed user security for corporate sponsorship. Zuckerberg’s belief that we should all have a single user account on the Internet is not only wrong-headed, it is a rejection of the very principles that made the Internet what it is today. Rather, it is a complete giveaway to corporations and governments that seek to track and monitor their people. Frankly, I have no interest in adding any more than I must to such a machine. My account will remain, as it has, as a pointer out and away from the poisoned walled garden.

When Google Plus came out, I was incredibly excited. Here was an opportunity to get in at on the main floor with a company whose motto is “Do No Evil.” I hunted for an invite and when a close friend sent one out to me, I jumed at the chance. To be fair, Google Plus had almost everything I wanted. The circles concept was genius, the ability to hang out was actually a lot of fun. While the site still had a long way to go, I really thought that I had found a place where I could settle into and become an active participant.

I was wrong. Within weeks, Google began to cut into its users. Anyone suspected of not using their real name was summarily removed from the network. No judge, no appeal, just erasure. Then Eric Schmidt reveals that Google Plus is not a social network but an identity service. This was surprising to me because I thought I was signing up for a social network. Furthermore, I don’t want Google acting as my identity service. I didn’t mind using my real name because I am actively seeking to merge my online and offline personas, but I quite understand the need for aliases. Personally, I use them all the time especially now that I am merging personas. There are certain things I don’t want listed under this name.

This is not wrong, it is the wonderful nature of an online universe that allows us to shed one persona for another, to discover new aspects of ourselves that we never could have imagined in the physical space (this is to say nothing of those who must conceal their identity online to actually avoid being murdered for their beliefs). Of course, it also makes it a hell of a lot harder to sell to us. It feeds incorrect data into all those carefully managed databases that track what we like and don’t like and that..well that just pisses Google off. After all, their money comes, almost entirely, from advertising. The better their information, the better the sales.

And there we have it. Google Plus and Facebook: so different, and yet, entirely the same.

Needless to say, I was frustrated. So I went to a small group of upstarts who made a splash on Kickstarter a little while ago when they suggested an distributed social network. I gathered information, found @diasporainvites on Twitter and requested an account. It is still in Alpha but this is a social network the way it should be. In a lot of ways, it feels like Google Plus. Considering how long it has been in development, you can tell that Google heavily borrowed from Diaspora’s look and feel. Circles are really just a new name for Diaspora’s Aspects and in Diaspora those useless Sparks that were on Google Plus become hashtags that allow you to track conversations inside Diaspora itself. I use them all the time. Best of all, Diaspora is built for the user. You want to use an alias? Feel free. You don’t want an account on joindiaspora.com? That fine. There are several sites (called pods) that you can sign up on. Don’t like the idea of storing your data on any of those sites? Don’t! If you want, you can run your own Diaspora server (although, right now, this is recommended for only experienced users). Create a small pod for family and friends and then connect that pod to the larger Diaspora community. Your data stays with you and no one claims any ownership.

As for financial incentive, Diaspora runs because some of the users pitch in to help. This is a community of people and users. It is built not to collect data for sale to highest bidder but to honestly connect people with one another. That is exactly what this giant Internet is supposed to do. It’s supposed to make our world a little bit smaller, a little bit closer, and little bit more open for everyone. That is why I moved to Diaspora. That is why I chose donate what I can (which isn’t much so they could use your help too!) to support Diaspora. That is why Diaspora is the first social network where I am actually going to be social.

If you want to join me, you can find me at textandhubris@joindiaspora.com. If you need an invite, leave a comment below with an accessible email and I will send you one immediately. Join a social network (ahem, or more accurately, a distributed social web) where what you do and what you say doesn’t feed some giant machine but rather helps to make the community stronger and more valuable. When was the last time that happened?

I read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article on why he would never move his blog to Google Plus [nbcite refID="3" refName="marshalk1"] and I have to agree with him. What he does a good job of highlighting, though, is that this is not an either-or proposition. A social network should never be the sole location of your online identity. It is a great place to connect and share but it is a separate space on the Internet and its interest and controls are not always going to be in sync with your interests. Having a site and identity outside of Google Plus or Facebook or Twitter is the only way to truly own your identity. After all, Text and Hubris is all mine. What I do with it is completely up to me and that is how I like it.

Now yes, I have a gmail address and my Google account is important to me. It is not the sum of my online identity, however. It is merely an aspect. If Google were to disappear tomorrow, I would still have all my contacts and my email and my photos. Which, once again, reminds me of the most important thing to remember: never trust your data to the proverbial internet cloud. It doesn’t matter how reliable they may seem. You don’t own that cloud server and, at any moment, its rules may change and your data with it. I may share data in the cloud but I keep every image and creative work backed up to a local PC which is then backed up to another hard disk. Technology is a great thing. It evolves and grows at a tremendous rate and I love a lot of what had been done with it. I even love a lot of what Google Plus is doing. It doesn’t mean the old rules don’t apply, though. Always keep backups and remember to police what you share and where you share. It’s your data and your identity, make sure you treat it like it is worth something.

A quick addendum to my last post. I do not think the novel as a form is going away. That would be—to put it mildly — silly. What I am saying is that we to have an ever increasing array of ways to tell a story. Conversely, we have an equally increasing number of ways in which to experience a story. This should be a cause for publishers and authors to celebrate not mourn. I would hope that we all know that the supposed death of the industry is—as I already mentioned —very silly. Rather than panicking and fearing the 99 cent novel or whatever comes next in the long line of tech scare fads, laugh, write, create and be glad there are so many ways to share your story.

I can understand that the idea of the 99 cent e-book is a disturbing one for many. After all, both publishers and authors are used to charging much larger fees for their work. The 99 cent price tag can almost feel like an insult. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see that attitude expressed in a recent post on IndieHorror that painted authors who price their books at 99 cents as uncaring or untalented hacks [nbcite refID="4" refName="creepy1"].

The truth is, in some cases, the author is absolutely right. We’ve all seen some terribly formatted e-books in our time. Usually, a lower price means less editing and a less polished final work (hence my occasional typos). This has been a typical argument against self-publishing for years and in a lot of cases it is spot on. There is also a deep fear that a low price point will hurt authors. At such a low price new authors may not be able to afford, as Margaret Atwood put it in her talk at ToC, “their cheese sandwiches.” This is a concern, I suppose, but I think it misses the greater point.

The point is that how we buy literature is changing. We all know this. Production and distribution, especially in digital formats, continues to get easier and cheaper. No, print isn’t going away. In fact, with print on demand (P.O.D.), I think that is all but assured. We simply have more options now and that’s not a bad thing. The 99 cent e-book novel is simply a part of that process of change.

Rather than shifting our models with these changes, I think we get bogged down in concerns over form. People seem to forget that the novel isn’t some sacred idol of book technology. It’s only one of innumerable ways to tell a story. Rather than bemoaning a shift in one form of writing why not find ways to deliver content that fits both your readers and your economic needs. No, I don’t think that digital novels will start selling, in the long-term, for 99 cents. I think chapters will. That’s what matters. I think in some ways we are seeing the rise of serials and I’m not opposed to that. To be perfectly honest, that is what’s been going on in YA and genre fiction for a while anyway. Harry Potter was a serial. It was just published in larger sections.

Yes. Writing and publishing is a business. I know it sometimes hurts to think of it like that but it is. For some, writing is a job. They dedicate themselves to their craft and that is important. We need authors and poets. They provide context and create the culture and the personality of our nation. In this country, that means they need to make money. I just hope that most are willing to change with the times.

Creepywalker on IndieHorror is right to call out poor quality and sales gimmicks. Neither work. A wholesale rejection of the 99 cent model isn’t wise either, though. In some cases, it probably is the most practical pricing structure.

[nbcite print="default" ]

Woah! Lance Mannion linked to my post. That’s definitely a nice thing to see. Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty quiet this week. I’ve been trying to wrap things up before Spring Break. I am glad I was able to make time for his talk, though. It was well worth it.

In other news, I got to witness a brief battle in the age old war of prose vs. poetry today as I listened to a short lecture on the use of rhythm in prose. It wasn’t that the lecturer (a prose partisan, to be sure) was actually wrong. He wasn’t. I just didn’t feel he was complete enough. Essentially, he discussed how prose uses rhythm and word placement to emphasize specific words or phrases and how that can alter the feel or meaning of a paragraph. In this case we were examining the effect of different translations of the same work. While all of this was rather evident, what caught my attention was his description of the musical nature of prose that allowed it to count rests as beats in the rhythm. He conspicuously left that ability out of poetry and even went as far as to show how poetry does not include rests in its definition of meter.

On the latter point, I believe he is correct. In technical terms, a pause is not counted. We do have hypermetrical lines and headless iambs but those are still roughly categorized according to a generalized metrical structure. I don’t see an issue with this, though. The meter is a guide not a declaration of sound or even a distinct rhythm. All music in 4/4 does not sound the same. The rests and pauses exist as readily in poetry as they do in prose. End-stops, caesuras, white space, along with word choice and word placement all provide the poet with a full arsenal of tools capable of defining and playing with pauses and spaces in his or her work.

As is usual with these discussions, I always end up feeling like a little kid watching mommy and daddy fight. They really don’t need to. One of the interesting developments in some of the more recent works that I have been reading, both online and off, has been their melding of poetry and prose. This melding isn’t even all that new anymore and I don’t think it’s a trend that will be stopping anytime soon. If anything, our increasingly networked minds seem to crave these moments of text that press on the definition of prose and poetry and expand them outward into new and exciting forms.

For me, that’s the space to be in.