Blogging versus Motherhood

As I said in the entry It’s been even longer, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but it is about contradictions, so here is one. In the same entry I questioned my return to blogging when I have so many other pressures on my time: in particular, why am I blogging when I should be being a mother. By which I mean, a better mother.

Such is the nature of our lives, and of my children, that I can’t really deprive them of my actual presence and attention by blogging. As hinted at in previous entries, most of my writing is done when they are asleep and I should be (although right now, I am being extra self-indulgent by writing this during daylight hours, between forkfuls of my late, microwave-reheated lunch, while my son is at school and my baby daughter finishes her nap in the bouncy chair next to me. The lunch aspect being the reason why I am not obliging myself to immediately dive into awaiting housework (washing up, laundry) or my thankfully-sometimes-doable-at-home work (current focus: exam corrections).

What I mean is, I sometimes feel guilty about the time I spend writing when I could/should be, for example, making flashcards to teach my son to read, baking cakes for his play dates, or absorbing parenting books to help me better master one of the most challenging jobs in the world (and practically the only one in which no one checks qualifications and suitability before engagement). What’s more, sometimes, writing about anything other than the sheer beauty of my daughter’s smiles and gurgles, or the glorious ecstasy of watching my two children gazing lovingly at each other, lying in our bed on a Sunday morning, seems somehow just plain ungrateful.  What? She writes/thinks about inane concepts like the downfall of humanity? Doesn’t she realise how lucky she is to have two such beautiful, healthy children, a good job, a nice house, etc. etc…

And of course, by devoting blogging time and space to such a subject, I have added a further layer of paradox to the theme of this blog that does nothing whatsoever to assuage my guilt.

Status Update

My rant about social networking became rather long, so I decided to leave until another blog entry my reflections upon one of Facebook’s main elements: the “status update”. This is the principal means by which a member “communicates” (for want of a better word) with others; users can respond to Facebook’s caring question“what’s on your mind?”, attach and comment an image, video or link, or just type whatever the hell they like, and these ‘updates’ are diffused to “friends” and followers in the Facebook world.

I seem to remember that Facebook status updates used to be restricted in length - a little like mobile phone text messages - to 160 characters, although this no longer appears to be the case (just as ‘unlimited text’ phone subscriptions and multiple-message Smartphone functions have made the SMS character limit obsolete). This restriction required people to exercise their verbal faculties a little, to condense their comments, anecdotes, jokes and observations into one sentence or so. But I think the role these statuses (stati?) play has gone beyond this; thoughts and experiences are no longer reported on Facebook, but evaluated, maybe even shaped by their suitability for a Facebook post.  My Other Half is even more wary and cynical about online media than me, and although finally persuaded (by me) to join Facebook, would probably like to think that he uses it ‘ironically’: however, even he regularly declares something funny enough ‘to go on Facebook’, and has been known to log on straight away to make it so.

While I'm on the subject of social networking and mini-messages, I might as well make it known that I simply don’t get Twitter, the so-called ‘micro-blogging network’. I mean, isn’t it just the equivalent of a list of Facebook status updates, without the other “applications”? And what on earth is a hashtag anyway? Twitter was just getting big around the time I finally joined Facebook: I did even sign up once, but I simply didn’t see the point and stopped checking my account. Rather ironically, I do still sometimes receive emails telling me about what is being “tweeted”.

Of course, the comfort in brevity, of immediate transferral of messages in short sound-bites that do not tax the concentration, is not entirely new to this social networking age; I’m thinking of newspaper headlines, or the popularity of inspirational/motivational quotations. So much easier than having to read a whole book in order to find improvement, enlightenment or solace! The difference is that headlines no longer head anything and quotations are no longer extracted; the mini-message is the sum total, and has become the norm of communication, both private and public.

 Many years ago I was lucky enough to discover the work of writer and artist, Ashleigh Brilliant, probably most famous for his vast series of ‘Pot-shots’ or ‘Brilliant Thoughts in 17 words or less’. He has made a career – and an art - of creating and illustrating humorous, philosophical and often beautifully sarcastic epigrams, following a strict set of self-imposed rules. Amongst my favourite examples that I recall are:

“A world at peace is worth not fighting for.”

“I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.”

“Please don't tell me to relax - it's only my tension that's holding me together.” (this one describes me very well)

 “Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.”

“I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.”

[All the above quotations obviously © Ashleigh Brilliant. I rather doubt this unpaid, unread blog post will have the power to lead any as-yet uninitiated to his work,  but just in case you are reading this, let me say that you’d do much better spending your time checking out his website www.ashleighbrilliant.com. ]

My sister and I discovered some of his ‘Pot-shot’ postcards in a gift shop, bought a pile and then ordered a catalogue by post (those were the days). We would spend hours pouring over it, showing it to friends and choosing which ones to buy to decorate our bedroom walls. Years later I was moved to look him up again, and am now on his mailing list and own a CD-ROM version of the complete illustrated catalogue of 10,000 Pot-shots, which I have been known to use for teaching purposes (it has a very handy search function).

As tweets and Facebook posts became ever more dominant, I was often moved to wonder what the great man must feel, now that it seems that so many people are constantly trying to be word-limited poets, micro-philosophers and punch line comedians. Does it denigrate his art, bring it to new prominence, or mean nothing at all? I contemplated asking him, and even started writing him an email – I found it years later in my Outlook drafts folder – but never ultimately found the time or courage to phrase the question before the passage of time made it seem obsolete.

Maybe the Facebook/Twitter phenomenon is a good thing. Maybe it pushes people to try to make their public statements that much more humorous, more thought-provoking, more broadly relevant and appealing. But I somehow doubt it. Instead, lives are being shaped and deformed by the tyranny of social networking – experienced in bite-sized, digitized fragments, as a mere mirror of an online profile.

Facebook face-off

Like my approach electronic gadgets (discussed in Technology in my Pocket), my relationship with so-called ‘social networking media’ such as Facebook is riddled with contradictions. Facebook in particular scares me with its unhealthy power and ubiquity. It requires and promotes the use of yet more planet-guzzling electronic equipment, as well as augmenting that invisible cloud of wi-fi waves, mobile phone radiation and GPS signals which constantly bombards our fragile cells.  I don’t know whether to consider it symptomatic or emblematic of all that is wrong with our current society, but I think it is dangerous and damaging to human relationships, communication skills and literacy. And I am completely hooked and check my account several times a day.

Again, as with technology, I didn’t jump onto the bandwagon easily. Back in another time and place, we had just finished painstakingly constructing our website for our amateur rock band, when suddenly nobody had websites anymore – everyone had Myspace pages (remember that?) No sooner had I got to grips with the friend requests and emoticons of Myspace, than I started receiving invitations to join this weird thing called Facebook. I resisted a long time, and then finally caved in and set up an account, early one Saturday morning, for no good reason (for some reason I remember this – I believe I was still in my dressing gown). That was the rest of the morning gone, and many, many hours since (although not as many as my Other Half likes to believe).

I have some genuine uses and excuses for Facebook. I live in a different country to most of my family and many friends, so it enables me to more easily keep in regular contact with more people, and provides a means of communicating and sharing in my native tongue. As many on my friends list are from school or university days, we are of the same generation, and are moving through life-changing events at roughly the same pace; as parenthood started kicking in, it was surprisingly useful to share gripes, worries, empathy and experiences with people I haven’t spoken to face-to-face (as opposed to face-to-facebook) for many years, and across a diverse network of people who have all known me, in some time, place and context, but don’t necessarily know each other.

But I sense that the current dominance of ‘networking’ format tools for communication is changing the nature of human interaction, and not in a healthy way. Once upon a time, if I wanted to get or keep in touch with someone, I wrote them a letter (later an email), composed and addressed for them specifically. (Okay, so bulk mail-shots and email lists are possible, and have their place – although I remember my mother’s dislike of receiving bulk generic letters from acquaintances with the Christmas cards, with the only personal touch being our names inked in at the top). With Facebook and the like, the author is the narcissistic centre of their “net” – the communication becomes much more one-sided, more about the author only. I can follow the lives of people I was at school with, or met once on a course years ago, without ever actually exchanging a direct word with them. (In truth, if it weren’t for facebook, I would have probably never had any contact with many of these people ever again in my life). I post about me -  how I am feeling, a complaint or idea I have, something I find funny or interesting and would like to share – but I just put it out there for others to make of it what they will, or ignore.

Of course, it is easy to show appreciation for a post by simply clicking the convenient “like” button, or to ‘share’ a particularly humorous or philosophical post on our own timelines/newsfeeds in order to bask in a little reflected glory. It is easy to add a ‘comment’, and maybe even start a bit of a discussion with friends of friends of the initial poster (I once had a dinging argument, comment-by-comment, with a guy I have never met who had put a bigoted, racist comment to something a mutual friend had posted, that I simply couldn’t let lie). But does any of this count as real communication? Is it damaging our facility to react with anything more complex than click-on opinions and typed one-liners?

I appreciate it when people share funny stuff, because I like to laugh; thought-provoking or socially aware stuff, because it makes me think; informative stuff, because I like to learn; personal news, because after all, all of these people were part of my life at some point, and it’s nice to keep up with what’s become of them. But I’m sure I am not alone in having ‘friends’ that also share their most inane thoughts and actions; photos of their cats or their lunch; umpteen ‘must-see-it-will-change-your-life’ videos; blow-by-blow accounts of illnesses circulating their families or their own bodies; every move they make (aided by the handy in-phone GPS functions). And the need to share all this, in my opinion, has gone far beyond conviviality amongst friends, to become a compulsion in its own right. For some, it seems, the priority is no longer to experience life, but to share it on Facebook.

Of course, I’m not obliged to read it, let alone comment it, “like” it or share it. If I don’t want to be bugged by people’s Facebook behaviour, it’s my responsibility to resist logging on. But the fact that all this is even possible, and seems to have become rather normal, adds to that specific type of worrying that is the subject of this blog. This move towards ever-more egocentric forms of communication can only lead humanity further down the road of its own destruction.