Commenting on commenting (Assignment 3b)

For my “intro to online marketing” assignment (oops, I mean Assignment 3 – haha), I originally wrote an obnoxious treatise on what the definition of journalism is. I figured that it would get quite a reaction from my classmates, even if that reaction was just pissing them off and getting lots of “you f****g suck” posted on my blog. After all, this assignment had absolutely nothing to do with soliciting comments of value. Here we were shooting for quantity, not quality.

So with that in mind, it was actually pretty easy to get people to comment. But I had to write about something bound to cut across a wider spread of my social networks. And after I received umpteen emails, tweets, and even invitations to join groups on Facebook with names like, “Yes, I have seen the video of Susan Boyle singing,” I knew I had found my ticket.

I do think that the content of the post, to some extent, matters. I say “to some extent” because ultimately the Internet is certainly populated with hordes of folks who are happy as clams to respond to banal, vile, vapid content. To write this post, I started in the real world. I made my pitch to my boyfriend, to a classmate, and to a few other folks who happened to be standing within earshot once I started ranting. This was something a lot of people had seen and reacted to. What better fodder for a commenting fire?

The comments themselves are on the sophisticated side, which is entirely due to the group of people I solicited feedback from. I sent out a few emails to friends and others in my extended acquaintance social networks. I posted it as a note on Facebook and tagged a few folks to get their attention. I used the subject line “help me do my homework” to guarantee the emails would be opened. But I also restricted the amount of people who could view the post to certain pockets of my social network. Not because I didn't want their opinion about Ms. Boyle, but because I don't like sharing writing with a wide range of people unless I am very proud of it. In that sense, I could never be a blogger in the way that Ms. Huffington told Jon Steward it should be done. I don't want to just put it out there, leave it, and see what happens. I have writer's insecurity issues.

Had I truly wanted to promote it far and wide – had I felt comfortable enough promoting the post to the full extent of my social network – there are plenty of other things I would have done. I would have posted it on Digg and told my friends to either comment or Digg the article. I would have urged them to cross-post it to other places. I would have posted it on Twitter.

But in the end, I rather enjoyed the results. In true micro-niche format, I was able to engage in an open environment (anyone is welcome to read the post, should they find it) but with an invited group of participants. And it wasn't just a circle of people patting each other on the intellectual back.

Receiving feedback was definitely more rewarding than not.

Commenting on 90s nostalgia

Photo courtesy of Peacefulbean (good karma) via Flickr and Creative Commons

Steve Waksman, one of my former professors at Smith College is a scholar of popular culture, music in particular, and has started a blog to experiment with the promotion of his upcoming book The Metal/Punk Continuum. Consistently following my own tendency to post comments only to locations where I have some tangible connection to the author, I replied to one of his posts this evening (see below).

I realize that my patten of entering the public discourse in such cautious and calculated moves does detract from some of the intentions we have laid out -- either explicitly through class discussions or the course materials or even implicitly -- regarding deliberative democracy and the public sphere. But it does bring me to think about the networks in which I travel and the unintentional connections made and webs spun. I remembered to visit Steve's blog when I saw Scott's post on Van Morrison. I'm unintentionally building links between these two posts through my digital footprints.

Anyhow, here's my commentary in response to Steve's post on hating 80s nostalgia. Since I can't speak with too much authority on distaste for a decade that I remember for colorful clothing, synthesizers, music videos, and Fisher Price tape recorders, I opted to talk about my personal favorite decade so far -- at least for music -- the 90s.

The 90s are completely under appreciated. Especially musically. But I recognize that part of the love I feel for the music of this decade is nostalgia. Some of it might even be ironic. But even the music that was bad -- even the height of the corporate posturing of grunge -- was better than the Clear Channel hard rock of today. I often wonder if this is merely my own skewed perception of the years I spent in high school or if somehow that decade was actually in some way "better" musically... I too have great love for punk bands of the 80s (based on my own narrow definition of what "punk" is). I didn't discover the best of it until I was much older (great albums by The Pixies, Sonic Youth, et. al.). All I remember actually listening to in this first decade of my life was Prince. Who is incredible in his own right. (I recently watched Purple Rain. Still amazing. On many levels. But perhaps irony is the highest).

Tweeting the NSOTU

Photo courtesy of -nathan via Flickr and Creative Commons

Some anecdotal observations from "watching" Obama's address to the nation this evening.

I'm not new to a multimedia, multi-platformed, swithtasking approach to watching major moments in political television. I gathered friends over for nearly every last debate (back when no one really knew a lot about Mike Gravel other than the fact that he had one of the oddest and most humorous online videos in presidential candidate history) and dealt with the span of their reactions to my insistance that I have a laptop in front of me and a Twitter feed ticking by.

Back then, barely a year ago, I found it difficult to keep up. I would be reading a Tweet, trying to listen to a friend's comment, and pay attention to what the candidates were actually saying all at the same time. Maybe it was just being a late adopter, but it was hard to keep up.

Tonight however it was like second nature. I saw a post come up in my Twitter aggregator (TwitterFox -- which throws it into a manageable add-on for my Firefox browser) with a simple tag: #NSOTU. It took me less than a full second to realize that was the tag for tonight's speech (read: Not State of the Union). Before President Obama was even a few minutes into the speech, someone posted a link to the full text of his speech. So in addition to listening to the commentary of the people in the room, reading the Tweets, paying attention to the visual images on my television and listening to Obama speak, I was reading along.

It was hard to keep up, with about 50 new posts per minute requesting my browser to refresh itself. A lot of the comments made it feel like I was sitting in a much larger living room with a bigger group of friends. In other words, a lot of commentary was focused on how fast Pelosi rose to her feet or placing bets on when we would finally hear the phrase "clean coal."

But occaisionally there was a spark of deliberation. And though it seemed a mere speck in a large mine of banality, someone would inevitably catch it and react. So small pockets of conversation were flittering around and I saw as voyeour -- all the while keeping to myself but reading along.