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.

With a hey-nonimity

In my last entry I gave away a lot more about myself than I ever intended in this blog. Originally I endeavoured to be completely anonymous – trying not to reveal my location, my job, even my sex. This was partly because this blog was not supposed to be about me, but to deal with more abstract concepts – although of course, as thematically it revolves solely around my personal wonder and worrying, it is in fact entirely, unavoidably, egotistically and uninterestingly about me, probably laying aspects of my inner psyche horribly bare to anyone who can read. The attempt at anonymity was also partly because I was paranoid about making some kind of false move or faux-pas in the blogosphere that would cost me my job, or cause some such miserable scandal of the type only social media can dish out, as we hear about so often (“teenager’s misspelt text message goes viral”…)

Of course, I’m sure to any vaguely astute reader, I have naively revealed all about myself numerous times. However, in returning to the blog I have purposely relinquished some of that anonymity for various reasons. Although I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood (I’m sure there are plenty of blogs out there dealing more efficiently and helpfully with such a subject), my everyday life is still so greatly taken up by the unavoidably female aspects of parenthood – namely, recovering from childbirth and breastfeeding – that I imagine it will inevitably show through in my writing. Furthermore, there is simply so much more interesting stuff on the internet that I’m sure nobody is really likely to find or care what I write.

So what else have I given away in previous entries? I have referred to my “other half” or my “partner”, so not so much to learn there. The reader knows that I live in or near a city with a tram service, and I may have mentioned mountains somewhere. I’m a teacher – and I imagine my subject area can easily be guessed (answers on the back of a postcard please. I wonder why they say that anyway. Whoever writes on the front of a postcard?) I have a sister, and I have lost at least two grandparents and a mother (for that matter, so has she). I like music (ooh, and so much more there).

And who cares anyway?

Anyway, as a breastfeeding, sleep-deprived mum of two with a house to look after (somewhere) and a job to do (teaching something), I guess I should be in bed rather than rambling further.

It's been even longer

I know I’m breaking all the rules of blogging here. I’m sure I read somewhere – and anyway, it makes common sense – that to be successful (i.e. followed and read by enough people to make it worthwhile) a blog must be regular, and consistent in theme. Well, it’s been over a year since my last entry; for all the usual reasons and a few less usual ones: our seemingly-insanely busy (but probably fairly standard) everyday routine, compounded by a few life-changing events. One of these was the death of my mother after a long illness, which I have alluded to, although not directly, in various previous blog entries. Then, more happily, since my last entry I have managed to conceive, carry and give birth to our second child, the arrival of whom approximately coincided with the death of my partner’s father, and us buying and moving to a new house. So, we’ve been occupied, to say the least.

I’m returning to blogging thanks to a good friend of mine: one day we randomly started talking about writing, and I let slip that I had this obscure, entirely-unread blog. She actually did me the honour of reading it, discussing it, and sharing some of her own ideas and words. What’s more, she persuaded me to keep writing. More of that in future I am sure.

I have been so unbelievably busy, not-to-say sleep-deprived, since my last entry that I hadn’t really felt that need to write that drove me in the first entries (as explained in First Entry). However, once I accepted the idea that I was going to return to it, the anticipation of doing so made a tiny part of my brain feel nice somehow, somewhere in the background beneath all the other stuff it had to deal with. I started writing entries in my head during night feeds and inane household tasks, enjoying the intellectual challenge of trying to order ideas and construct paragraphs mentally, and to hold on to them until such a point as I could write them down.

The feeling faded as I kept putting off the moment – I of course couldn’t allow myself such a luxury before finishing such-and-such a piece of work, and then there was the tax return to submit, and then…and… But tonight is the night.

Why oh why am I trying to return to blogging, when there are so many other things to be done? My baby is only three months old and still waking me at night, so any time not spent doing something absolutely essential is time that should be spent sleeping. In the day-to-day, any moment when I am not directly dealing with either or both of the children, I am usually obliged to dive quickly into one of the absolutely unavoidable household chores – namely washing up, laundry or cooking. The slightly less incessant tasks like hoovering or cleaning windows go – well, out of the window (hah, hah). (This problem is compounded by having just moved to a house in which some of these tasks have not been done in the three years since the previous residents departed, or I think in some cases, in the hundred-or-so years since the house was built).

Then, my job – I might as well tell you; I’m a teacher – is far from being one that fits into a closed schedule and can be left at the office at the end of the day. There is always correcting, grading or admin to be done, or preparation for the next day, week or year. If ever these tasks seem finished, or at least sufficiently un-urgent to allow me to contemplate doing something else, I could/should be improving my practice by reflecting, reading and researching.

Then, I could be reading a good book, or picking up a long-neglected musical instrument, or finishing my sister’s Christmas present (a knitted scarf). I could be attempting the novel that I have had rattling around in my head for literally years. I could study a foreign language, do my physiotherapy stretches, get some badly-needed exercise. So why, instead, return to my (almost) entirely-unread blog?

Well… we’ll see how it goes. I still rather like the title. And the colour scheme. And, if I ever permit myself to liberate any brain cells from the tyranny of the everyday, I still have some ideas – and worries – concerning the state of society, the future of humanity and the wonder of the world.

So it seems I’ve broken another presumed rule for successful blogging – that is, to keep the entries short and to-the-point. And having made that observation, I guess I’d better stop here.

It's been a while

It’s been more than two months since my last entry. This was due to a chain reaction of circumstances – a heavy period at work, followed by a possibly-not-unconnected bout of illness, followed by another heavy period at work trying to catch up following sick-leave, and culminating with a life-changing event, the anticipation of which I have touched upon in previous entries. But I am NOT ready to tackle that in a blog yet.

I started this blog in a slightly less hectic season work-wise, and was quite surprised at myself for managing nearly two months’ worth of regular entries. Then I lost momentum, and was not even sure whether I would pick it up again – there novelty of blogging, especially when one remains entirely unread, wears thin after a while.

One thing a period of illness allows me, is the leisure time to read. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a keen reader, and have real difficulties putting a fiction book aside once started. Thus I can rarely allow myself the luxury, except on long journeys by public transport (alone, not with a toddler) or when sufficiently ill to lack the energy to do pretty much anything else. Thus recent acute bronchitis meant I could indulge in a fair few novels (it was not a long illness, but I can read pretty fast). I would like to share a few thoughts about the most thought-provoking of these books, and the reflections they induced concerning the subject of this blog. Of course my indulgent meanderings cannot do justice to the power and skill of these novels (I can only say that you would be much better spending your time reading these books than some inane online blog).

I read The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, telling the story of four generations of a Chilean landowning family, encompassing issues of poverty, class conflict, political unrest and fascist oppression, with a poetic dose of spirituality and the supernatural. I read Inés of My Soul, also by Isabel Allende, about the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Chile and the horrendous suffering and bloodshed involved on both sides. I read The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, which tells the interweaving stories of several characters set in London during, and immediately following, World War 2.

These books are cracking good yarns, with amazing plots and effective prose. All these books include vivid and moving depictions of shocking cruelty and suffering inflicted by humans on other humans. They also tell stories of survival, of the strength and resilience of which humans are capable in situations of immense difficulty and suffering. All these books are fiction, and yet draw on historical events so closely, that the experiences described clearly reflect real experiences lived by people of those places and times.

This reading experience once more brought home to me the abstract and indulgent nature of the concerns that supposedly drive this blog. If death is potentially around every immediate corner, and every day is a fight for survival – as it must have been for many during the Blitz, during times of military persecution and fascist rule, during the Spanish conquest and all other episodes of aggressive colonialism – then a person has no space to fret about the potential fate of the entire human race and planet Earth. Generalised ecological and economic worries are luxuries afforded only to those who are not battling significant, immediate personal hardship.

I also have the luxury of wondering if/when the collapse of the current economic and ecological systems will bring about human suffering of the immediate, intense nature of some of the scenarios depicted in these books. It may well already being doing so in ways of which I am shamefully ignorant.

Makes you realise how lucky you are.

New tram tune

I’ve got a new tram-to-office tune! 

As I explained in Too much music, I’m a terrible creature of habit on whom 16 GB of iPod space is completely wasted, as I usually switch to one of two tunes for the walking part of my commute. Well, all that changed this morning.

For once, I hadn’t even wired up for the tram journey, as I had a gripping novel to finish. I love reading – I could make that the subject of an entry, or even an entire blog, one day – but it’s rare that I allow myself fiction on the tram, as I’m such a plot junkie that it is too painful to put the book aside and return to the real world on arrival. As it happened, the end of today’s read was something of a disappointment, as I was able to discover (with serendipitous timing, due partly to a tramway technical glitch) just one stop before the end of my journey. I don’t know what made me get the iPod out for only the less-than-five-minute tram-to-office trot, and even less what made me need to listen to a different song.

This time I will reveal what the song is, in the hope of introducing the genius of Oysterband to people who have not yet had the opportunity. My family discovered this band several years ago, but for some reason I had only really got into one album, Here I Stand. Recently I pushed myself to expand my repertoire, and discovered the album The Shouting End of Life, and in particular latched on to the song ‘Everywhere I Go’.

I like Oysterband for their variety – their lyrical love songs, rollicking dance tunes, and political, anti-establishment rants. ‘Everywhere I Go’ falls into the latter category; it is about, as I understand it, the confusion and contradictions of the world we live in, and how we are manipulated by the powers-that-be. The chorus is as follows:*

‘Everywhere I go I see what’s going on

And the more I see, the less I know.’

Here is my favourite line:

‘And the food we eat won’t go bad

But the cows are mad and the chickens glow

They want to tell you this, they want to sell you that

Just hold your hat when the black wind blows’

This song has an invigorating, driving rhythm and pulsating cello line, which along with its angry lyrics are fantastically energising, perfect for my morning commute. The only problem, if it can be called a problem, is that it is followed by a beautiful ballad called ‘Put Out the Lights’. This song can make me cry, for two reasons: 1) its combination of poignant lyrics and harmonic progressions mysteriously provoke certain biochemical reactions within my organism; 2) Someone very close to me (previously mentioned in my Waiting for the end and Christmas entries) suggested this song as a possible funeral choice. This has resulted in me having to hide tears on the tram on more than one occasion, but then this is not the only song (or stimulus) to have this effect. Luckily, repeated exposure is making me less sensitive to its effects (a little like the treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder perhaps).

This is also helped by the fact that it is followed, two tracks later, by one of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard: ‘Don’t Slit Your Wrists for Me’. Set to a rollicking, Celtic-like dance tune, it is about a girl with ‘…rings on her fingers and a bone stuck through her nose … wearing studs in places where the gardener never goes…’ rejecting the advances of a hormonal young man:

‘And I wouldn’t say I couldn’t be a lover

Not if there was nothing else to be

But if love is what you’re dying to discover, darling

Don’t slit your wrists for me’

This song has had me grinning to myself, or even giggling out loud on the tram. By the time my iPod has fed me these few tracks, my fellow commuters must be wondering if I’m really safe to be let out on my own in public. The joys of personal, portable music . . .

* All lyrics copyright the Oysterband, quoted without permission but with evident admiration and appreciation. I am fully aware of the dodgy ground of quoting song lyrics by authors still-living or not sufficiently dead, and am taking the risk as I think it is blindingly obvious that my doing so cannot possibly have a negative effect on the respective musicians' income or reputation, and is clearly not for personal gain. To paraphrase the approach of the great political musicologist Philip Tagg: so sue me.

Happy New Year

Like Christmas, the end of the year and all the pomp and circumstance that goes with it is too much for me to tackle in a blog entry. I suppose I could trot out some really obvious things, concerning clichéd, and doomed New Year resolutions, or my history of disappointing New Year celebrations. Even by my own standards it is not really worth the waste of blogosphere space or electricity.

I will just share one thing that I was lucky enough to receive for Christmas, and that I am hoping will greatly help in my approach to 2013, if I let it. One of my most precious Christmas gifts, beautifully handmade and from someone who knows me very well, came inscribed with the following quotation.

“Life is not about sheltering from the storm. It's about learning to dance in the rain.”

The best I have done with Google's help is find various versions of this phrase, attributed to various authors. I won’t spoil it by trying to add anything further.

Love you sis.