Come on in and have a seat, if you like…

Welcome to the place where I gather my thoughts.  There are so many ideas in the world, and most of them seem to fleet by without a fixture to hold them in place for more than a moment or two.  We all have inspired moments.  We all have genius ideas that promise hope for the future.  Yet, we often share those ideas with only ourselves, or our loved ones, and after they have given themselves for a temporary romantic dream, we let them go.  We shared the moment, but did not retain the thought.

As an historian, I find those lost thoughts to be a little sad.  We should find a way to retain them, and to somehow develop them into genuine ideas.  Even if they never get past the dreaming stage, they might serve as a launching point for other ideas that lead to action.  Not all thoughts need to be (or indeed ever should be) acted upon, but I would argue that most have the potential of being built upon.  That is what this site is intended for… a place to gather my thoughts, develop them into ideas, and eventually transform them in to essays, stories, or other final products… perhaps even leading to some action now and again.

I started my first blog in the late 1990s, long before Facebook, or Twitter, or Myspace, or any of the venues of social media were born.  At that time, the phrase “web logger” had not yet morphed into the more simple contraction of “blogger,” and very few people were using the internet to express or to share their unpolished thoughts and ideas.  As a result, I had very few pre-made tools to rely on.  There were countless sites where you could build a webpage, and most of them came with basic tools to do so… my first webpage was called “Poor Zorea Almanack” and was hosted by the now defunct www.geocities.com.  The banner read, “Dedicated to the Pursuit of God’s Truth through Study and the Arts.”  I chose the name as a gentle tribute to Benjamin Franklin, and our website was intended to provide a few pictures and some basic news to family and friends.  I tried to keep it updated, but that was tricky because I had to create the boxes and spaces for news and pictures from scratch, everytime I made any changes — I had no templates for easy updates, or posts, or for sharing.  It was a labor of love, but it was labor nonetheless and after four years I gradually let it die.  Once Facebook appeared, then it contained all the elements that I was trying to accomplish on my own, and it was already built, and it seemed everyone was becoming a part of it.  So I joined and my site was ignored.  When geocities went under, my site and its back pages vanished into the ether.

My Facebook account is over 11 years old, and for a time I very much liked the easy communication with friends and family and even with complete strangers that social media allowed.  Nevertheless, there are also some weaknesses that come from that much interaction.  I have thousands of “friends” on Facebook, which means there is no way that I can possible maintain a real connection with all of them.  The design of Facebook is geared for very quick thoughts, with little real interaction.  Each post is limited to a few hundred characters — I can post longer ideas, but then most of the text becomes hidden behind the “see more” link, which requires people to push the link if the post is to be read in total.

Much of Facebook is designed around population control and time management.  There are so many people to keep contact with that we budget our time to only a few seconds for each post.  I have to admit that I was guilty as anyone else of passing right over those links that included longer posts.  I told myself that I would go back and read them later, but more often than not I would get caught up in other newsfeed items and the post was lost.  Also, the posts tend to favor images and discourage plain text alone.  The newsfeed is constantly updating, and it is easy to feel like you need to “get through” them all.  I found that I often only looked at the ones with pictures and skipped past the ones that were text only.  Without intending to, I found myself “interacting” with my friends through a non-verbal voyeurism (please forgive the term), in which I could see what people were doing, but did not really engage with their lives.

Please do not misunderstand — Facebook is very good at what it does.  It is never boring, and it is not unstimulating… we love to see these pictures, especially when they are cute or funny, or sentimental.  We have built-in stimulus cues with the “like” buttons, and we are encouraged to check back continuously to see how many “likes” our latest post garnered.  We love to share the posts that made us laugh, or inspired some emotional response — and in that way, we get to garner more likes and more anonymous responses.  In this way, Facebook has successfully evolved into an entertainment medium of its own — positioning itself as a final destination for family, friends, news, humor, sensation, and any number of visual stimulations.

Unfortunately, I think there is also a potential danger in social media.  Facebook is a business, and I applaud the entrepreneurialism behind it.  Yet, at the same time, it is also run by real people with their own ideas and agendas.  With nearly a billion users, Facebook realized that it held great power and lately, the organization has been using its power to influence cultural priorities by influencing its users directly.  In part, this comes in the form of customized marketing (which I have no particular issues with), but in part also it comes in the form of subtly prioritized algorithms that shape the tone and content of your newsfeeds.  Unless you limit yourself to only a dozen friends, there is no way to see all the posts that are generated every day.  Facebook uses algorithms to filter which posts you see on your newsfeed and which are ignored.  Interspersed with your friends are other posts and advertisements generated by Facebook itself.  The result is a constant stream of posts on your newsfeed that can color your perceptions of your friends, your social connections, and your working world.  The last election cycle demonstrated just have powerful those algorithms can be… most of my friends share the same priorities and convictions that I have, and yet my newsfeed was flooded with wave after wave of memes, and rumors, and assertions, complaints, applause, and general commentaries that reflected only a minority of my social connections.  The larger majority of my friends were mostly unheard from — I only saw their posts when I directly sought their homepages.  They were truly a “silent majority.”  There is an unspoken pressure to remain quite about the ideas that seem to run counter to the mainstream opinions, and since Facebook gets to cultivate which opinions are most displayed in the “mainstream” then it is easy to feel yourself silenced.

About a month before the elections, I began to realize that my daily Facebook experience was making me feel increasingly isolated and removed from the mainstream of society… even though these posts were supposedly randomly created from my friends.  It was clear that this was not an accidental experience.  Once I realized what was happening, I just quit.

The idea behind social media is a good one, and I support the ideal of harnessing technology in ways that allow us to reach out and share our thoughts with each other.  It was the original impetus behind the labor-intensive “Poor Zorea Alamanack.”  I gave up the labor when Facebook appeared, but now, I think I will resume it again.  Our modern web-tools are so much more improved that an interactive site is relatively easy to maintain.  Facebook and Twitter and even the defunct MySpace combined with other social media icons to help pave the way for practical interaction through the web, which includes emails, but also other avenues for essays, thoughts, stories, and ideas.  From simple blog posts, to powerpoint slides, and multimedia videos, these ideas can be uploaded and shared and preserved.  This website is intended to share my thoughts and ideas, and my essays and stories, and to do so in a way that solicits some conversation.

I realize that the price of quitting Facebook is that I have far fewer people to share my thoughts with… few people will accidently stumble on this website.  Yet, in truth, I suspect that I did not have that many people to share my thoughts with on Facebook either.  The newsfeed to did not encourage actual discussions, and few thoughts were really cultivated or developed through the exchange of civil discussion.  The “see more” link discouraged genuine engagement, and the inherent demands of time made it very unlikely that my “Facebook friends” would pause and interact beyond a brief thought here or there.  I will continue to use Facebook to advertise my posts, but it is more of an advertising media than a social-interaction tool.

As far as this site is concerned… it is only beginning.  I have not found the template that I like yet.  I did not want a “site under construction” banner across the page, so I started with this design.  It will most definitely change.  With luck, I will also post updates at least weekly.  I am not sure how to “push” my posts through email to those who want to follow this blog, but that also is a temporary issue.  Eventually, the site will be interactive in a way that lets visitors stop by when they want, signup for email updates as they like, contribute their own thoughts and ideas when the mood strikes them.  In this way, this website is a bit like my office and I encourage you to stop by and sit a while, if you like.