I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, "I do SEO," but I'm not, and I don't, really. The truth is that I don't have a good, simple, answer to the question, "How do I succeed on-line with social media." I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I've already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that "meatspace" connections are among the most powerful and valuable "cyberspace" resources.

During college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it's affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that "networking" opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn't. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, "contact" between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices. [1]

Contact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in "every day life" and in creates a notion of "politics" that's closer to "people interacting" and further from something tied to institutions of power ("government," etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to "contact" and further from something that resembles "networking." And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people's work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.

While there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you're interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That's not contact, in the sense provided by Delany. [2]

There is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with "track" features, [3] represents (or did) a move away from "networking" to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users. [4]

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I'm not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote "contact," and eventually become "networking" opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It's also quite likely that we'd be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I'm sure, but I'll leave those for another time.

[1]	I suppose this isn't a wholly radical concept, but in any case, I think the "we need to talk to each other," and live in integrated/diverse situations is definitely a step in the right direction. Delany's articulation is quite useful and complete.

[2]

Indeed I've strayed from Delany in a couple of key directions. First his essay(s) described contact as being a uniquely urban phenomena (which I've totally abandoned), and secondly something that resonates with sub-cultural groups (queers, poor, etc.) In the case of the Internet, I think this works but I recognize that it's a stretch.

[3]	Once upon a time, you could receive (via IM) twitter updates for any keyword, even if you didn't follow the people who sent the tweets. This means that all of a microblogging can have a conversation with each other, and circumvent the isolating aspects of "social networking" constructs.

[4]

By general population/topic I mean non-technical (largely) channels, such as rooms for fandom (fans of science fiction; and pop culture) rather than "working" or customer support channels. Though people would be drawn for a host of reasons, discussions seemed fairly random, and my sense is that (if my experience can be generalized from) that some pretty powerful friendships/connections were developed in these contexts.

I had an odd experience as a writer a few weeks ago. I found myself writing "copy" rather than my more comfortable "blog post," "essay," or "fiction story" and I learned a great deal from the experience. Mostly, "never be a copy writer if you can help it," but I learned something about my other writing in the process: basically I write conversations.

This makes sense on a number of levels. First, it explains why I enjoy blogging as much as I do, and why I write for the blog in the way I do. Blogging is a conversation, I write stuff, you think about it, you comment. Repeat. Or I read something, and I respond with my "part" of the conversation. Secondly, I've occasionally been told by recipients of particularly quick emails that I "write just like I talk," which makes sense given how I type, and how "natural" that is as a communications medium for me. Third and finally, people who've read my fiction, routinely comment on the dialog. [1]

This may also be why "being a writer" (professionally, creatively) has been a struggle. On some level the writing, even the fiction, is a means to an end. Banging words out on the keyboard for the blog is a means to have a conversation with you, dearest readers; writing fiction is a means to explore ideas and conversations that I couldn't begin to articulate except through fantasy (on some level.)

When I tried to write knitting patterns, I wrote these essays that were basically me standing up with a finished sweater saying "so if you want to make this, start here, and then do this ..." and so forth through the entire sweater. On one hand they were stories, on another it was just me talking.

I don't know what this means about me, what I write, or how I write. Frankly, I'm not sure I'd like to know much more, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Onward and Upward!

[1]	I suppose the lingering forth item would be that my first attempt at graduate school was methodologically focused on narratives and "small stories," in conversations as a means to understand "the individual in context" as it were. But that's neither here nor there.

Most of the time when something new happens on the internet, I'm hopelessly behind the curve. I only really figured out wikis a few months ago, and I was a bit too young to get blogging out of the gate. And I was late to live journal and even then it took me years to figure out why that was so cool.

But microblogging? I was totally there, I mean I wasn't there at the very beginning, but from the moment that there was any amount of steam behind twitter, I got it. Which is really cool, at least I think it is. Basically micro-blogging is a short, 140 character, "blog/messaging service" which combines the best parts of group chat and

And as you might know from your own experience or from my previous posts, I've tried a lot of services and have a few opinions about what makes a service better or worse. I can hear you saying, "What tycho opinionated?" but suspend your shock, and hang with me.

Today was the first day that my regular blog post/essay didn't get crossposted to my livejournal. This is one of the cool things that I can do now that I've redone tychoish.com. So LJ-land if you want to read about a really cool linux/open source thing click the above link.

In other news, I've been toying around with identi.ca which is the flagship of an open source federated twitter clone called laconica. (You can join/follow my "dents" here if you use any Laconica site.)

Now I'm a really big fan of the twitter except that my prefered method of interacting with twitter is via the IM/jabber interface, which hasn't worked for months. While I'd love to jump ships to another platform (like identi.ca or jaiku), twitter has too many people that wouldn't jump ship with me. So until Laconica can import tweets a little better, I'm going to be in a couple of different worlds for a while. Anyway...

I listened to an interview with the author the other day, and I think I'll be writing some blog posts on this subject very soon, but its mightily cool, conceptually (because it gives everyone a lot of control over their microblogging life.)

A while back I wrote a post--after identi.ca started up, actually--about how microblogging needed to be thought of as an evolution of IRC and IM rather than an evolution of blogging. Not so much in terms of database structure (though I hear that would help,) but in terms of user interface and interaction.

I still think this is the case. Just FYI. And I still want to use something that really works. And better access control would be good.

Ok, blathering over.

Onward and Upward!