Yes, I realize that social networking is not new. Yes, even the online social networks that are the focus of this article have been around for a few years. Consider this, though: the ability for human beings to communicate clearly with one another, anywhere in the world, without a need for any acquired knowledge outside of one’s own spoken and written language, and practically instantaneously, arose from the telephone. The earliest such clear communication from one place to another removed place, that is documented, happened on March 10th, 1876.

America Online was founded in 1983, over a century later, and was the biggest online social network of its day, back when AOL implied it was an interface for the internet and before the general public realized that was untrue. MySpace came about twenty years after that and really generated a recognition of the capabilities of the online social network, but was loosely regulated and regimented. And on September 26, 2006, facebook.com opened itself up to anyone with a valid email address.

Thus, the social networking scene of today only began a few years ago and is still new in the grand scheme of things. I’ve only been on facebook since 21 August 2007!

* the editorialization above is mine, of course

The social networking technologies I currently use are: facebook, twitter, linkedin, instant messaging, and blogging (henceforth, The Big Five). I still email, occasionally. I basically email for work and to those acquaintances of mine who have not joined one of the social networks. There are two of those people in my circle of contacts. Two.

I first started using the internet with my Apple IIe back when Compuserve competed with AOL for dial-up modem users and the hackers found BBS’s to keep them entertained and scoffed at services that had GUI’s. And nobody who used a computer was considered cool by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. Once I got into university, I discovered these things called unix and VMS and acquired something called an email address. I learned to finger people and carry that shame with me to this day. In these early days, the only way I knew to communicate with someone via computers was to find them on AOL and mail them within that service, or find someone in JHU’s printed mail directory (fingering them to make sure it was the right person — sounds awful, doesn’t it?) and then mailing them there. I probably used pine to do it, too, since I didn’t like elm. What the hell am I talking about?

Back on track, one day while trying to figure out how to use a computer to tackle a physics internship project, I discovered a program on a Sun station called NCSA Mosaic. Some user before me, I think, had set the homepage to WebCrawler. I knew pretty much nothing about what was in front of me, but there was some sort of field where I could type and some sort of button that my cursor could click and thus my life’s productivity began its downhill journey. (for younger readers, this is akin to discovering Google for the first time)

What I discovered then, and subsequently cherished for about a decade, was an unrestricted access to anything that the world wide web of tubes had to offer. If I wanted to find out information about an actor on Friends, I wasn’t limited to what AOL was willing to show me. If I wanted to communicate with someone from my youth in Korea, they didn’t have to be at my university, all I needed to do was track ‘em down with InfoSpace or WhoWhere. My previously restricted access to only my joined services exploded into access to anything broadcasting the http service. And I adored that freedom. I reveled in it like a non-nerd might revel in backpacking across the globe.

Sad to say, from the beginning of my use of the internet, I ran into spam and spoofing. I fell victim to some scams at first, just like most newcomers to internet fraud. By the early 2000′s, I was getting a ratio of something like 1000:1 spam emails to legitimate emails, even using a new email address! When I first discovered MySpace, through a swing dancer friend, I suddenly found a way in which I thought I could communicate with people from all around the world… but only REAL people, not spammers and scammers. That lasted a day or two. The overwhelmingly irritating abundance of abusers on that site made me wish for a service that was similar in robustness but with better security against annoyances. And then came facebook and the other internet technologies I currently use.

The primary reason I use The Big Five in order to communicate with the world at large is that I am, by and large, shielded from garbage feedback. If I don’t want to see junk from an app on facebook or to be friends with someone there, I block it or ignore them, respectively. I choose who I follow on twitter. I choose my connections on LinkedIn. I choose who I instant message and whose IMs I accept. And there are lovely plugins that protect me from spam on this wordpress-powered blog. If a service is more annoying than it is rewarding, I’ll take my time and money elsewhere. BTW, this is also why hulu.com generally kicks youtube’s ass: more reward than junk.

These days, most of my legitimate emails are either internet purchase receipts, or notifications from a service for which I signed up. There are many reasons why I like facebook, but here’s a quick one for anybody who’s not already onboard: how would you like it if all your emails were ones you actually wanted to read? There you go.

And each of The Big Five fulfills a different desire for me:

• facebook is like a great unending party full of my friends. Sometimes they’ll wander off to another corner, other times they’ll run up to me to share a fun meme, and once in a while something crazy will happen involving a sheep or a muppet. When one friend passes out another might wake up. I always share at least one thing in common with each person there. Occasionally there are an abundance of shared interests and discovering them at the party makes us closer friends. We walk by each other and make comments like, “Hey, it was good to see you at such-and-such,” and “Oh, we should totally do this and that,” and “Happy Birthday!”
• twitter is similar but more in the vein of multiple conversations going on simultaneously, all of which revolve around, “So, what are you up to?”. The added benefits here are that you are perfectly welcome just to listen, and to listen to people whose paths you might never cross in real life. I’m enchanted by @feliciaday’s tweets and often laugh out loud at @michaelianblack’s tweets. I may reply to them once in a while in a semi-fan/semi-peer sort of way, but I don’t envision meeting them in real life. On the other hand, I also follow some friends and find this a great insight into their streams of consciousness.
• LinkedIn is my business networking in a social framework. I connect to various acquaintances and collect and give out recommendations in the hope that we’ll all mutually increase each other’s career values. If I came across a business opportunity, I’d immediately look to my LinkedIn connections first to pass it along.
• Instant Messaging / texting is email and telephone’s faster and cooler lovechild. I do realize those aren’t the same things, yet… I suspect they soon will be. This is my preferred method of direct communication when I don’t feel the need for the richer and more dynamic nature of a spoken conversation. It’s like a private conversation that stops and starts by either side’s whims, somewhat regardless of their current situations.
• Finally, Blogging is contemporary journalism. Sometimes, it’s simply a biased reporting of facts, other times (like this), it’s outright editorializing or feature writing. Today’s novice reporters need have no credentials but their own work, and not necessarily any sources but their own experiences. A gullible reader can easily be led astray from the truth, but I suspect that blogs will just train internet users to question more and sift reality from the falsehoods better than they otherwise would.

The current social networks are, obviously by inspection, inherently more limited than the internet at large. But a savvy user can choose their own connections to the existing streams of information and thus acquire a data feed that is much denser with usefulness than a yahoo search and empty of fraudulent African royalty.

What a beautiful world!

Words are important.  I still think that numbers are the vocabulary and mathematics the language of the universe, but that metaphor shows just how essential words themselves are.  Words are what we use to change the world, more than muscle and more than science.  In fact, I think that the notion of magic came about because some people were able to use words in unique ways that frightened and amazed others around them.  The ability to manipulate words so that disparate ideas can be joined together in unexpected ways is beyond many and certainly strikes me as magical.

I am proud of my ability to make letters dance across a page to a tune of my own devising.  I am not the greatest author the world has ever known, but I think I am no simple scribbler of pedantry either.  I write sentences that make me smile and I try to convey concepts in interesting layers of colorful hyperbole.  Sometimes, I can surprise myself by the structure and eloquence that I manage to capture in fleeting phrases.

In 2008, Aba invited me on a quest to write fifty-thousand words in a month.  I worked hard to accomplish that goal and in looking over my achievement, I think it was good and feel pride in my production.  That story is not yet finished, but I intend to tackle the challenge again come this year’s November.

Thus, I resolve to finish my book from last year’s National Novel Writing Month before the next begins.  I shall also continue to write whatever I can, whenever I can, in the form of these blogs and perhaps in other endeavors.  I have found that I can write poetry, though it is juvenile and amateurish.  I have found that I can editorialize and spin fictions.  I have found again and again that I feel great joy when my words come together and stand before me in thoughtfully organized dispositions which effectively convey my ideas.  I have been happy to discover that once I record an idea for posterity, more ideas stand up to be recognized and captured.

I will write more in 2009 than any previous year because I love words.

I think there are two exceptionally memorable episodes of the Cosby show.  Not that I actually remember the plots, there were just segments of the two episodes that left a significant impression in the clay of my recollections (assuming, of course, that my memories are accurate).  The first episode that always leaps to mind is one where the whole Cosby clan put on a show for the grandparents by strutting and lip-syncing along to a jazz record.  That’s So Rudy got to pretend to sing some of the funniest parts.  The second episode that I always associate with the series is one where I recall Bill Cosby and a guest star doing a little dance battle.  The guest star would do some fancy tap dancing and then shout challenge so that it sounded like “Chah-LONJ”.  Bill Cosby would do some fancy footwork in return, and this went for a while.

I thought of the latter episode as I drove home on Thursday night because Abigail just challenged me to join her on a quest.

Let me pause a moment to say that if you are ever invited upon or spy the opportunity to join a Quest (and you are not opposed to the goal), you should leap at the chance.  Many of us give ourselves daily, weekly, monthly, lifelong goals, and that’s all well and good (some of us have no goals and that is sad).  But the goals we give ourselves must originate from some thoughts of our own, even if the goal is to acquire new thoughts or experiences.  A Quest, on the other hand, is a life goal that you might not ever have devised for yourself since it came from outside your own mind.  You might have…but you didn’t!   For a brief while, you could walk paths you’d never otherwise tread; you might experience situations outside your wildest imaginations; at least you might pick up a souvenir along the way.  Try not to pick up anything more intrusive.

Back to Abigail: she challenged me in a very affable manner to complete a novel in November. She was not so aggressive as Sandman.  She would write a novel in November as well.  It would not be a collaboration, just a shared activity.  The Quest: with no more assistance than the reassuring existence of a metaphorical comrade-in-arms, create a 50,000 word novel in a 30 day period.  I cry out, “Chah-LONJ!” and I step up.

There are many story ideas I’ve had in the past and I’ve written quite a few words to begin a book here and there, but I’ve immediately realized that wanting to write a novel feels quite different from being challenged to finish a novel.  This could be good.  This could be really good.

I obviously don’t seem to have much problem in typing out a pile of words in a hurry–if anything, I write too much on the Internet.  It’s probably going to clog something one of these days.  One of the real obstacles on this quest is The Plot.  I don’t intend to write something abstract and complicated (unless that’s how it turns out, in which case that was my intention all along).  Rather, I would like my novel to have a beginning, middle, and end, and I would like all of those pieces to come across to the reader as being related to each other.   Protagonist and Antagonist?  Yes, please.  Story-related problem and climax?  That would be great.  Resolution and happy ending?  In lieu of innuendos, I’ll just say that I’d like the story to reach a point that feels like a satisfying conclusion or a point of “Life goes on” dissipation to the narrative tension.  I’ll have to work on all of that.

Another obstacle on this quest becomes clear when I consider the very sound adage that a writer should “write what he knows”.  This is advice that even writers of speculative fiction should follow, so the best of them develop a World Bible for their story, even if that is wholly internalized.  As a practiced reader, it’s clear to me that literature about a topic written by an author unfamiliar with said topic often fails to impress.  I know almost nothing about deep sea diving, but I’ve read a good example and a bad example on that topic and the bad example was obviously full of garbage.  My personal experience seems lacking to write a novel (not enough law breaking, world traveling, career changing, or general debauchery), but I won’t let that stop me.  If I start writing about a topic with which I have no familiarity, I’ll attempt Internet research and then if that is insufficient, I’ll attempt some real life interviews with people who are knowledgeable.  I’m hoping that a new website I’ve discovered LivePerson.com will help me if I stumble.  Then, too, there are all of these social networking sites I’ve joined.  Perhaps they can finally be of some practical use instead of data voyeurism.

The third great obstacle I anticipate is the task of whittling down the ideas that I’d like to include so that I can finish within the parameters specified.  Laconic, I am not.  I could easily annoy myself by writing a 25,000 word flashback in chapter two.  That would just be embarrassing.  I am going to try to help myself out by prioritizing the list of concepts I would like to include: self-interest versus selflessness, loving relationships, friendships, passage of time, confidence, independence, dogs in packs, badassness, challenge photography, traveling, energy exchange, cancer, metaphorical dancing, muppets, ramen noodle.  That is a list that I just created by envisioning a story and jotting down words that described concepts I visualized, and then I reorganized it by priority, from highest to lowest.  I’ll try to keep my words on ramen noodle to a minimum.  I’m pretty sure I can keep that list from growing.  Maybe.  I’ve purchased the Scrivener software for Mac to help me be organized.

But my biggest problem today is that I want to START TODAY.

I strongly suspect I have either a penchant for obsessing, or outright problems with addiction.   Ooh, Addiction!  I have to add that to the list…

Today is a day in January of 2008 and I am full of opinions. It’s a good year for opinions, what with the Presidential Election of the United States of America coming down the line. I’m planning on rocking the vote, like many in my generation of US citizens, so that goal should provide me with numerous occasions to rant about how Everyone’s Wrong But Me. Coincidentally, that’s an excellent song by Ella Fitzgerald in her early days. See? There’s an opinion already. I can’t stop myself.

I’m also planning to write thousands, perhaps millions, of words this year. In part, I’ll be writing to communicate my opinions to intrepid explorers of the blogosphere. In another part, I’ll be attempting to earn some money from the world wide web (does anyone remember that phrase?) with a link-loaded review site called LibertarianStyle. And in yet another part, a more private part for now, I’ll be working on several book ideas I’ve had.

At the end of last year, I gave myself the project of writing a blog entry every day in December until Christmas. Somewhat to my amazement, I accomplished that goal! Some day’s entries were better than others, sometimes I had to really work to type out an article, but overall I feel pride in my results. The project’s purpose had been to rekindle the flames of my Christmas spirit (done) but an incidental result was my reawakened realization that I enjoy the written word.

Words are important. The building blocks of communication appeal to me to a degree that few material goods do. I like the shades of different meanings that distinguish synonyms. I revel in the structure and sounds of syllables strung together. I never fail to be amazed that these letters can carry meaning from one person’s mind to another’s. And each word has its own purpose.

It angers me when some abuser of language misstates an idea and dismisses his own failure with the excuse that “you know what I mean”. I have been naive on many topics in the past and I’ve hoped for forgiveness on those occasions, so to avoid hypocrisy I consider that I should be more understanding. But at least I try to learn the truth on matters and refrain from using ignorance and approximations as excuses for inaccuracy.

I fear that allowing the decomposition of the English language will contribute to increased stupidity in its speakers. The ability to differentiate between slightly dissimilar situations is what allows us to make advances in technology, psychology, art, and any other area of study. Any speaker who routinely declares that his own flawed statement is “close enough” simultaneously declares that he is not as skilled a thinker as a speaker who is precise.

I hope to dash off my thoughts in these blogs quickly, but without sacrificing the integrity of the right word. As a good comedian should never need explain his jokes, so should a good writer never need explain his choice of words. The reader should be able to derive both the meanings and implications of the choices to the best of his ability as a reader. Just this once, though, I’ll explain my reasoning to start this blog down a path of clarity by showing what I mean by the right word.

The title of this entry is one I composed carefully. Rather than calling directly upon god for damnation, or condemning an unspecified it, I direct the reader to damn me. The direction is a sarcastic one as I don’t really expect or desire a condemnation, but perhaps a humorous effect can result from implying a damning for appreciating writing. Love is a strong verb, but I am trying to convey the strength of my affection, so that’s correct. No, I don’t plan on marrying writing, ha ha. And the word writing itself can mean the composition of the written word, the act of writing, the results of writing, and even things that others wrote. Well, I do really like all those aspects of the word, so that conjugation was chosen on purpose, too.

That was a little boring, so I won’t do that again, but hopefully you’ve gotten a look at how my slightly compulsive mind works. I do plan to write many other things. Come on along. Share the love.