Twitter has no rules. That’s what I keep hearing from people who think they are the vanguard of a new movement. Don’t believe it. There are rules EVERYWHERE.
Twitter has dozens of unwritten rules. If you copy and paste someone else’s tweet, you should give credit with an RT or a “via.” And you shouldn’t tweet that all your followers are dumbasses. It’s not nice.
People who routinely insult, snub, and inflict harm on others are not thought highly of in our society. Is there a written contract by which we agree not to tell a loved one they’re fat? No, but we generally don’t do it. It’s a rule. These are not my theories. They are truths for the majority of people.
The classic defense for narcissistic Twitter behavior goes like this: “Twitter is an opt-in environment. If you don’t like how I behave, unfollow me.” This is nonsensical. It is an attitude that denies the simple fact that civilized people are socialized. Throughout out lives we learn that there are rules governing how we behave toward others. As children, we’re taught to share, not to insult people, to be kind. These lessons extend well into adulthood, and the very smartest among us never stop learning.
Rules and laws are not the same thing. Is there a law against showing up drunk for a job interview? No. Is there a rule against it? Absolutely. It’s unwritten, but it’s a rule nonetheless. This idea of a rules-free world is a philosophy you can imagine someone in a restaurant shouting into their iPhone.
Sometimes experts (real or imagined) codify these rules in an attempt to help others navigate the tricky waters of ever-changing manners and social interaction. Am I pretending to be an expert if I share a few of these rules?
If you’re of a certain age, you read Dr. Benjamin Spock’s baby book, or maybe you read T. Berry Brazelton. These books contain societal rules. Few would argue there are no rules for raising children. “Put child-proof pulls on your knife drawer,” is a universal rule. If your personal Kitchen Bill of Rights prevents you from doing this, you might want to sacrifice your God-given freedom just this once so your kids don’t die.
And so it goes on Twitter. Can you tweet anything you want? Sure. But socialization is not about doing whatever you want. It’s about getting what you need, and taking care not to harm others. I guarantee the Free Twitteristas are insulting people, alienating them, and quite likely losing real friends. That is the collateral damage of assuming there are no rules, which is the same as not caring what people think of you.
I didn’t intend for it to be an experiment, but I just realized that my brief fling with Rally (alternately called Rally Up), was one of unrequited love. I had some hopes for Rally that weren’t realized, due mostly to unreasonable expectations on my part.
A Foursquare veteran, I decided a while back to download Rally, because I read about its developers in a Santa Cruz paper. I liked its premise, “a social network for real friends.” It seemed so Santa Cruz in its philosophy, encouraging people to only add real friends that they knew in the old, pre-social networking era, and respecting privacy in a way other social networks did not.
I actually live in the mountains about 13 miles from Santa Cruz, which is our closest “big city.” I have about 15 “friends” (yes, the quotes are necessary) on Rally. What I found is that I checked in regularly, especially when I was in downtown Santa Cruz, but that my check-ins where of the tree-in-the-forest variety. With a couple of exceptions, I encountered very little interaction, even though I often encouraged it in others.
Most of the people I have as friends on Rally are people I have met in person, or who have similar professional interests and of course geographic proximity. But only a couple were real friends prior to my adopting Rally.
This small scale experiment hardly qualifies as a scientific study, but I do think I can draw some conclusions from it:
I might actually have nothing in common with and/or nothing of interest for the people on my friends list
Strangers and acquaintances can become friends online, but they are more likely to do so offline
The evolution of real friendships from online friendships isn’t guaranteed, even on a very small scale and with people who have common interests
So for me, using Rally is like sitting in my car outside an old girlfriend’s house, hoping she’ll see the error of her ways. (I’ve never done that, seriously.) So I just deleted my friends list and sent an email to the company requesting the account be deleted. It’s time to pull away from the curb and get on with my life.
I learned this morning that in a previous post I had incorrectly identified Andrew Breitbart as a “Fox News blogger.” I was in a cafe having breakfast with my children when I discovered this, so I was not able to revise the post, but I did immediately post a comment with a correction and an apology.
Why am I devoting an entire post to pointing out a fact error? I think there’s something to be learned here. So often, publications (online and offline) issue retractions and corrections that are far less prominent than the original “offense.” This is out of embarrassment, and in hopes that the correction will satisfy whomever was wronged or offended, without damaging the reputation of the publication. For this reason, and because I am proud of my integrity, my record and my reputation, I wanted to make my correction as prominent as my original post.
This is the era of realtime communications. My kids often remind me that no electronic devices are allowed at the table when we are having a meal, a rule I hold them to in regards to iPods, Game Boys, etc. But that was before I got my iPhone. (Stay with me here, there’s a point to this.) And it goes beyond my obsession with Foursquare check-ins. So while we were waiting for breakfast to come, I checked my email and saw there were two comments correcting me on Andrew Breitbart’s affiliation. I really hated that my mistake was hanging out there for all to see, and I was unable to fix it. (Maybe I was better off not knowing about it at breakfast.)
The mistake also bothered me because I was taught that fact errors are cataclysmic in proportion. I had a journalism professor who gave an automatic F to anyone who had a fact error on a paper. Once, he deliberately “fed” the class a misspelled name so we would use it on an assignment and he could then flunk us all and make his point. Something told me the name was spelled wrong, so I omitted it from my paper. I got a C-. The rest of the class got F’s. This is how I was educated on the importance of getting it right.
One of the comments on my Breitbart post was of the “thought you should know” variety. The other was fairly foaming at the mouth, suggesting “Don’t continually propate [sic] LIES or you become what you decry.” I made a mistake. I admit and regret that. There are no mitigating circumstances. I did a sloppy job researching the Breitbart’s affiliation and the chronology of events in the Sherrod situation.
To classify my mistake as a lie is a stretch. It was an error, as grievous as you wish it to be, but not deliberate. It is not in the same class as the malicious and deliberately deceptive work done by Mr. Breitbart. I have quickly corrected the mistake, and fully owned up to having made it, something Breitbart and company have not been quick to do.
“There are these fabricated things that the Fox Newses and the Breitbarts of the world generate just about every week. They got attention with one this week because it was so outrageous. But it goes on just about every single week.”
If you haven’t followed the story, USDA official Shirley Sherrod was fired after Fox News* blogger Andrew (not so) Breitbart, in an attempt to make Sherrod appear to be a racist, posted, out of context, a portion of Sherrod’s remarks made at a meeting of the NAACP.
Putting agenda ahead of ethics and fairness, Breitbart has yet to offer a credible apology for the embarrassment and damage he deliberately caused Sherrod’s career. Bill O’Reilly issued a watered down apology, citing additional “questions” raised for him by Sherrod’s remarks.
Personally, it makes me long for the days of Harry Reasoner, Walter Cronkite, Bob Woodward and Dan Rather, newspeople who had only one agenda: tell the story as completely and fairly as possible, with reliable sources and verified facts.
From an ethical standpoint, there is no difference between this story and that of Jason Blair, the former New York Times reporter who, according to the Times itself, “fabricated comments…concocted scenes…(and) selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.” The parallel is stunning in fact when you consider the use of technology (Blair cropped photos, Breitbart edited videos) to alter the story. Blair, incidentally, resigned after his misdeeds were made public by the Times. Breitbart charges forwards. Truly, we are in a different era.
So why am I attacking “Citizen Journalism”? Sadly, as news outlets find budgets slashed, and fewer people are taking on more work, the old school journalistic system of checks and balances has been dismantled. Breitbart is, for all intents and purposes, a Citizen Journalist who happens to have the use of a very loud media channel, Fox News.* But he is not burdened by editors, fact checkers, legal considerations, or a journalistic canon of ethics.
Breitbart uses the same tools a blogger writing from home, the office, a cafe, or the student union might use. Blogging software is free and intuitive. Most bloggers write and post what they want with no oversight. Anyone can take a digital photo, and edit it in Photoshop or Picnik, upload it to Flickr (or directly to a blog.) Anyone can take a Flip video or cell phone video and do the same.
Social media has given us an environment that has been Photoshopped in multiple dimensions, causing us to call into question the validity of everything we read, see, hear and watch.
With Citizen Journalism, all of the barriers to entry have been removed. Garrison Keillor said, “when everyone’s a writer, no one is.” It could also be said, “when everyone reports the news, no one is a reporter.”
* Andrew Breitbart is not employed by Fox News. I regret the error in reporting that he was.
Information orphans of the Google era, unwanted telephone books are accumulating in front of people’s homes everywhere, creating an eyesore, a nuisance, and a timely reminder of a bygone era. I think I receive seven or eight a year.
Phone books aren’t the only fallout generated by technological advance. We’re still experiencing an e-waste hangover from CRTs (which probably don’t cause cancer after all), replaced by more compact, greener LCDs. And yesterday, I noticed a cart outside of a conference room stacked with e-junk, including two fax machines and — wait for it — a typewriter. For a moment I thought I was on the corporate equivalent of a ghost ship or maybe attending a steampunk conference.
According to the 2000 Census, there are 105 million households in the U.S. If these households each receive just two phone books a year, weighing, say, two pounds each, that’s over 200,000 tons of potentially wasted paper dumped unceremoniously curbside and on doorsteps each year. In many places, the books just sit there and rot.
I actually like the phone book. There’s nothing better for looking up the hours or address of a local business, or finding a plumber or mechanic. And the phone book is more trustworthy than Yelp and other user-generated, hyperlocal reviews. There’s no gaming the system in the yellow pages, no backroom deals. Whoever pays the most money can have the largest ad. It’s all spam, so I don’t have to differentiate. And the claims come from the business owners, so I know their biases.
According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, one Boulder Creek resident decided to do something about the problem. “(Hilary) Stanley counts 16 trips to the recycling center just last year, shoving as many as 120 discarded books per trip in the back seat of her car. ‘They’re just dumped out of a van on Highway 9 and other main arteries, and there they sit.’”
Some phone companies are reducing the size of print runs. Others are agreeing to clean up unwanted books within a few days of delivery. And consumers can call directory publishers and ask to be taken off delivery lists, but like so many other things, the question remains, why deliver something to me I didn’t ask for in the first place, and why make me responsible for ending deliveries?
All this made me wonder — what physical thing will be the next to disappear or fall into decline, thus contributing to the next wave of articles made obsolete by technology?
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