Social Media Motifs

My friend Holly wrote a piece yesterday about the rather small number of motifs that all fiction can theoretically be reduced to.    I'm familiar with the point and it is a good one--  there really is nothing new under the sun and most all novels tell one of the same old stories,  in a unique new way.   And the idea of the same old stories being endlessly repeated certainly resonates with me in my social medial activities these days.   Sometimes it seems that every other thread I read deals with one of a handful of seemingly endless arguments.

The "Google + is the greatest thing since sliced bread" threads  (now numbering 12,344,963,021 as of 7/14/2011 05:29 GMT) aren't really arguments.    While I am definitely underwhelmed with G+ and very frustrated at Google's inability to let me use one account to access all of their services I desire,   I am hardly a strident critic of Plus itself-- it seems to me ridiculously early to be passing any sort of judgment about a brand new product still in beta.

Another debate,  which is a bit livelier is over whether it is okay to Like or +1 your own material.  Some argue that it is simply basic SEO, while others feel that it is silly, tacky or even unethical to to Like yourself.   I don't see it as an ethical issue, really,  and I'm sure the SEO advocates have a valid point.   But I am so trained by years of using StumbleUpon to be very restrained in giving thumbs up to my own material  (like yourself often on SU and you get sent to a kind of purgatory-- click up all you want,  no one will Ever see those posts) that I really just can't bring myself to Like and Plus myself.   Luckily I seem to have friends who are willing to do it for me.

The question "what is spam" certainly brings out strong feelings.   Most everyone hates spam.  Most everyone is certain that they themselves do not spam.   Yet the beat goes on.   Those who have things up so that every time they type 140 characters they score 1 tweet, 1 blog post (on Tumblr), and 1 Facebook post certainly don't think of themselves as spammers,  though other folks certainly do.   There are  lots of gray areas,  reasonable arguments about different audiences on different sites and it seems to me the chances of this question being definitively resolved within the lifetimes of anyone who will read this are, pretty much, nil.

The most contentious perpetual argument on Empire Avenue is,  I have come to believe,  "What IS A Blog?"   Those who read my earlier piece with that title will recall that it is not a simple question, but rather a sorting mechanism that pits creators against curators against copiers.    And which participants may accurately be sorted into which of these categories and when generates,  I have come to believe between a third and half of all conversation on the Avenue, in the communities and in the Facebook groups.  (The G+ crowd is so busy crowing about plus,  that they ignore even this most insoluble of the endless social media arguments.)

While I can at least hope that some of the hype around plus will eventually die down and we can have a chance to use it and work with it and see what it can and can't do and importantly how Google handles the issues that will inevitably arise as they roll out Plus to the entire planet.  I quietly point  out that Google does not have an especially enviable record for user satisfaction, and is very Facebook like in making it pretty much impossible for users to contact a human been for support when something goes wrong.    There isn't really anything new in social media.   Only people clever enough to have the same old discussions in ways that seem new all over.

Sometimes....

Sometimes I just hate Google.    Long time readers of my books blog will recall some years back that it was a change on Blogspot (which required anyone commenting on a post to sign in with Google or Open ID and did not allow one to comment leaving just your name, e-mail and URL) that finally got me to move the books blog over to WordPresss.     I railed against Google at the time,   and was pleased that they after a time changed it back.     Indeed I probably would not have used Blogspot for this new personal blog,  if they had not made that important change.

While reading the zillionth or so person's observation the other day about how bad Facebook sucks,  I find myself thinking the other day about how much I dislike having become basically a pawn of a few huge companies online.    We all know how bad Facebook sucks.  particularly in terms of their privacy policy and their complete lack of customer service.  (Unless of course you are an advertiser-- a friend tells me that advertisers can get someone on the phone or to answer an e-mail;  my friend explains to me that Facebook users are not Facebook's customers.)    And the same of course is true of other huge online companies.    Those of us who use g-mail are definitely Google users, rather than customers.    This started off as a post about how frustrated I was at not being able to get into Google+.

You have to understand that for years my primary Google account has been based on a typo.   Way back in the MUD days  (if you don't know what that is, you are an online NEWCOMER who needs to remember her manners-- don't care how much Klout you have) I used the handle outofit.  Out of it.   That was how I often felt when I first began hanging out with some friends from Compu$erve on Timewarp  (telnet: quark.gmi.edu:5150).    To get to Timewarp I typed  that string at ! Unix prompt.   The Unix shell account I bought and accessed over dial-up from my local ISP was the only way for folks not connected to an .edu or a .gov  to get online.    So it was,  very early in my blogging career when I set up a new Blogger account  (long before gMail days btw) that I chose my old handle outofit.     I'd used it for a number of years and had not yet conceived my libdrone handle that became the one I try to promote everywhere and always.    Silly me.   I typoed  ouofoit  into the account creation box and quite failed to notice the typo before I submitted it.    For all of these years I have published multiple blogs while logged in as ouofoit@gmail.com,  an address I never gave to any of my friends.   And which I never connected to the web of a dozen or so e-mail addys I use,  all of which forward into the one gMail box I actually use to manage all email correspondence  drone@libdrone.info.

This last bit proved to be critical.    I received dozens of invites to +  from different friends at lots of e-mail addys.   And every time I clicked to join in the fun,  I got an error that + requires Profile and your organization is not allowed profiles.  (gMail on my own domains,  the free plan).     I finally added a profile and displayed my real name with my very old typo ouofoit and after waiting about,  voila,  I am accessing the Plus and busy finding and adding all my Facebook friends.      Time was I talked about how using different handle for different parts of your life enabled you to pursue even specialized interests with very different groups of friends,  who have little in common with each other and whom you don't want to mix with each other.     Google +   with its circles feature seems prepared to enable you to finally do just that with your primary social media logins.     How ironic that on Google +  I am a 4 year old typo come to life.