We’ll start with the two blogs that i maintain, because although those are already pretty defined in my head, i’m going to adjust and refine the role that my blogs have to be an even greater separation between my professional and “conceptual” entries which will live on mendellee.com versus my life entries and “specialized” entries which will live on my livejournal. Before, my LJ served multiple purposes – it involved things going on in my life, but i also used it as a “short thoughts” blog, an “ideas” blog, a movie/game/tv review blog, things of that sort of nature. I still feel like it’s more appropriate to house my life and any random movie/game/tv reviews in that context, but i’m going to shift most of my “short thoughts” and “ideas” content to here, as well as some life stuff that may involve my schedule as it relates to creative projects or creative processes.

I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. One, I feel like this site needs to have more activity, that this should become a more important hub for my public presence, and hopefully shifting some of what used to be LJ activity will help with that. Two, I’m trying to encourage myself to write more about my Actual Life on my LJ which wasn’t exactly the idea when i first started my LJ but has leaned more towards that in the past year and I want to continue. There’s a multi-layered motivation for doing this related to a couple of events that happened over the summer which i may discuss in a separate post on my LJ.

That’s the easy stuff. Now we come to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Each of these needs to be addressed in two respects – as a contributor and as a reader. I’ll address each service separately.

Twitter: Originally I created a Twitter account as a means of shifting the concept of “status messages” from facebook to a paradigm where i felt it better fit. (in case you missed it, i wrote about why.) I then ported over selective statuses to fb by using “Selective Tweets.” Since that time, I’ve activated some privacy protocols that makes Selective Tweets not work, and i’ve relaxed my stance concerning the value of fb statuses as it relates to my fb page. So Twitter became a more nebulous space as a contributor, and with the inclusion of google plus, i started to use my twitter less and less, seeing g+ as a preferred method of posting random microblog bursts.

A part of me feels like I could abandon Twitter altogether, but a greater part of me feels like that’s the wrong thing to do. Twitter is a great tool with some key sets of expectation that isn’t met by any other social media. So in order to make myself more proactive in that realm, i need to create a definition for how i want to use it and brand myself in its use.

There are a few common paradigms for twitter use, and many of them are ones that I reject. I don’t want my twitter to be a personal advertising space. Neither do i want my twitter to be a conduit for my other presence on the web or for the “check-in” concept that’s promoted by the likes of foursquare or yelp.

So i think i’m going to use it in the way it used when it first existed: as a space for short life bursts. I’m also going to experiment with tweeting exclusively from a smart phone, considering it more of an on-the-go kind of thing.

Out of all of my social media, twitter will probably be my lowest priority when it comes to reading. I have a manageable list of people that i’m following, but some of the regular twitterers use it more as a conduit space than a speaking space, and that sort of tweeting to me is clutter and pollution that I don’t like filtering through. Check-ins are annoying because i don’t really care where people are. redirects or link postings are annoying because without having context that twitter can’t provide it’s a coin-toss whether or not i’d find the link worthwhile. Not that i’ll never read twitter ever, but i don’t feel an overwhelming need to stay on top of it.

Facebook: i was a relative latecomer to the facebook generation and have never been afraid to voice my opinions about what i feel are the big positives and negatives of facebook. I don’t hate it, but i am always mindful of some of its huge pitfalls and approach my use of it both as a contributor and a reader with a high degree of wariness.

what value i get from facebook as a reliable virtual rolodex, the kind of created culture that it represents, and the role it plays in my social presence as a personal broadcaster and a professional broadcaster through the marching band is too important for me to abandon facebook despite the fact that I don’t actually like it all that much. The recent facebook release in particular is problematic because there are now too many decisions about visual design and priority of content that are made for me behind the scenes, and those decisions are deliberately designed to be difficult to change. (i addressed this in the latter part of the aforementioned “social identity problems” post if you’re interested in the specifics).

What does this mean for me as a contributor and user of facebook now?

As a reader, what i want to happen is to be able to capture a slice of time of whatever happens to be on my news feed of the time of all 1000ish of my friends and be content with that. This means that i should probably do a similar thing that Mark did with his and do the painstaking work of changing all of my friends subscriptions to “all” posts instead of “most” posts (which i can unfortunately only do one friend at a time).

As a contributor, honestly, i still don’t have a great answer. I’ve decided that I still want my facebook to be pretty much All Surface and start to conceive of my google plus as being a potentially more intimate social atmosphere, something that can be inbetween facebook and livejournal, but exactly how that plays out practically is still yet to be defined. It still feels right for me to use fb as a conduit for my other social presence, but google plus has that place too, and i’m not sure how to achieve balance in how that could be used across both social mediums. It could be something as simple as “LJ entries go on fb, mendellee entries go on g+”, but with the power of g+’s circles allowing for more flexibility in that, that feels like an easy-but-not-quite-right answer that with a little work could be better defined and honed.

speaking of which.

google plus: in comparison to both twitter and facebook, my google plus feed is somewhat of a ghost town, and contrary to this being a deterrent, it’s rather a nice breath of fresh air. The problem is that if i want to try to shift more of my contributions and reading to google plus, it could easily end up feeling as unmanageable as facebook can be, both in the way i choose to write and the way i choose to read.

This is where i think careful manipulation of my circles will come into play. Right now i have a lot of incredibly impractical circle definitions that all need a complete revamp. At a basic level, i need to create two kinds of circles: “reading” circles and “filtering” circles. Reading circles don’t need to be defined right now because my traffic isn’t high enough, but a part of me is starting to feel like the best way to deal with reading circles has to do with the frequency of a poster. Prolific posters will get one circle, once a week posters will get another, once a month will get another, and some levels in between based on the amount of traffic. The main purpose/function of this would be to ensure that amidst the regular g+’ers i don’t miss something from a user that sticks a singular post within the busy throngs, which is philosophically closer to how i treat livejournal (everything that’s written on my friends page/circles stream is important) rather than twitter or facebook (all i care about is what happens to be going on at the moment).

As far as filtering, the only one that’s currently important to define is current students versus non-current students to help create that necessary separation between personal and professional. Beyond that, defining filtering circles is more difficult because a part of me feels like it should be as much in the hands of those who are reading me as myself. It may be that i won’t mind sharing more intimate details with person A and B, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to actually hear it, and i want to be able to respect that.

Practically that’s a difficult thing to address. It’s fine if i just deal with the people who are in my “reading” circles now, but when someone new comes along, they don’t have a conception of how i could be using circles well enough to know how to fit in mine, and it’s counterintuitive to me to put someone who just added me into their circles through a equivalent of a detailed questionnaire just to put them into my circles. That’s just obnoxious.

That side of it is full of conjecture anyway because i’m not sure exactly how intimate of a space i can put myself into online in the first place – even in a relatively comfortable setting like livejournal i tend to hold back on things that make me feel weak or vulnerable. There’s a couple periods of my life where i went through some intense emotional trauma that still impacts my life outlook today, but to most of the world that trauma is invisible – as well it should be. That sort of stuff is not meant to be publicized no matter how close or intimate a “circle” can be. But as with all things, there’s a wide spectrum between extremes that can be explored and toyed with, and google plus is where that potential can be.

The other potential choice of “filtering” circles has to do with conduits. As in, if i start to use g+ in a conduit way like i use fb to publish videos, LJ posts, and mendellee.com posts, i can create circles specifically for those so that those who have no interest in being a part of my conduit world won’t see that stuff. So if you have absolutely no interest in seeing when i post up LJ posts because, say, you’re already my LJ friend or you just don’t care about my life in that sort of detail, you don’t go into the LJ circle which is the only way that you’ll see that stuff appear on my feed. Of course, this leaves out “lurkers” from being able to see whenever i post to LJ, and highlights one of the other issues of filtering circles in general which is that filtering circles necessitates a mutual relationship when maybe i don’t want it to be. If a stranger decides to follow me on g+, adding them to a circle kind of means that i’m following them back; sure, i can stick them into a circle full of people that i’ll never read, but that reeks of subterfuge to my virtual nose and i don’t want to be associated with that sort of virtual smell.

We’ll see how all of this develops; in any case, it’s a starting point, a way to more clearly define my roles in all of these mediums and start to use all of them to their fullest potential (at least for me). As these roles take shape over time, i’m sure some small and big adjustments will be made. If it’s significant and interesting enough for me to talk about, i’m sure another entry will pop here.

In other words, how do i choose to use facebook differently than google plus? What would make me write a blog entry on my domain blog vs. my livejournal? What constitutes a twitter status over a fb status or a g+ stream post? Some of these questions can be answered, but some of them cannot, and it’s the ones that cannot that i feel i need to focus on and refine.

With my two blogs, i deliberately separate what content i choose to put where. My livejournal blog is about my life and my friends and thoughts of a more personal nature, whereas this wordpress blog is my more public face with content bent towards thoughts of a more long-winded and cerebral nature. I call this wordpress blog my thoughts blog. I call my LJ my life blog. Even though there is sometimes a degree of blur, i think it’s pretty clear to myself and to my audience what content belongs where.

It’s this sort of distinction that i feel like i need to have between facebook and google plus. Like my two blogs, i feel like the purpose and audience of those are very similar, and therefore the uniqueness of them comes entirely from the content that i choose to write. despite the fact that one *could* use fb in the same way as g+, doing so arbitrarily is problematic because of the audience i’m trying to reach. I want my friends on fb to get something different than those who subscribe to my g+ feed. To have a heavy degree of duplication or even similarity in style between those two feels wrong; someone would likely only subscribe to one or the other, or those that subscribe to both wouldn’t get much different out of one versus the other, and that’s not what i want.

Despite the recent changes facebook has made that has seemed to alienate some people, facebook still holds my largest audience and thus it acts as my “hub” for most of my other social media, meaning that i import some of my tweets to fb, i post links from select blog entries here and LJ to fb, and i post links from my youtube page to fb. But i don’t want to use facebook as a hub for google plus. Google plus needs to stand out on its own in the same way that my blogs stand out on their own.

But how should that happen? I don’t really want fb or google plus to have the same professional vs. personal distinction that my blogs do. And despite my desire to not have a heavy degree of duplication between fb and g+, the fact is that what i choose to share of myself on the internet doesn’t have much content variance other than that.

So maybe this is an opportunity to change that. g+’s Circles has a great deal of flexibility as it relates to selective sharing, so it’s possible that i could write things of a more personal nature if i structure it in a way that i trust. Or maybe this is an opportunity to ween myself off of any direct relationship to fb and use it merely as a conduit, because the new changes that fb rolled out have some advantages, but they also a direction change for that platform that enhances everything about fb that i dislike.

That last statement warrants some expansion. There are two aspects of the new fb changes that bother me the most.

First is the upper right news ticker. That news ticker doesn’t seem like a huge change, but i have to hand it to fb: it’s absolute genius.

Tickers are one of the big reasons why i never watch rolling news channels and why i can have issues watching sports channels. When you first get introduced to the idea of a ticker, it seems like a big distraction, but the more you watch the channel, the more you get used to it and incorporate it into your understanding of how that channel works. I don’t watch sports obsessively, but i watch enough of it that that i don’t notice the bottom ticker unless i want to. I don’t watch news channels ever, so those tickers are a constant source of flash and distraction, but if i were to watch the channel more often, i know that i would absorb and become accustomed to it. And once you get used to the ticker being there and what it represents, the ticker’s purpose has been maximized: to provide another avenue of constant change of information that’s designed to keep you watching.

The internet in general hasn’t really used the ticker paradigm for much; the NFL uses a variant of it on their website with big neon flashing signs whenever there’s a score change or a big play during a game that you’re not tracking or watching. But now, fb is changing that game, using that ticker formula in a way that will try to keep people logged on that much more often because they can and will always look at it for change of information whether they want to or not. And sure, most people hate it now, but give it some time for people to get used to it, and before you know it, it will seem Normal, and that constantly shifting and changing ticker of useless information will help make fb an even bigger time suck than it already is.

Secondly, fb has added a higher degree of customizability to how people view their feeds, and normally as a guy who is all about data and loves having the ability to be versatile with it, the way in which fb has incorporated this flexibility is counter to how i want to use fb.

fb is a dominant part of our culture. i don’t think that it’s inherently bad or good; like any tool or piece of technology, how bad or good it is is dependent upon how it’s used.

My use of fb as both a poster and a viewer is deliberately designed to be all surface – as a poster, fb acts as a good conduit for me to contact people and to get some basic interaction with those people. What fb does *not* serve as is a place where i want to have any real meaningful interaction. It is not a platform for my political views, it is not a place where i want to divulge the real personal details of the person that i truly am, and it is not a place where i am going to put important details about anything going on in my life in a way that assumes that people who are close to me are going to read it.

As a viewer, i want to see on my news feed a slice of what has happened the most recently with whoever has happened to post. i don’t assume that my friends that post important information on fb expect me to get that information only from fb; if i catch it, awesome, but if i don’t, then it’s not a big loss because i would assume that the people closest to me would tell me important things outside of that fb context.

And this is where the customizability of the new fb becomes useless to me, because all of the customizability assumes that i want to control that information in a way that takes fb much more seriously than it should be taken. “i care the most about seeing feed items from these important people in my life, so i’m going to tailor my fb feed to see their stuff the most.” But the amount of time that it would take for me to micromanage and microcontrol fb’s settings to make it do what i want is simply not worth it. To customize it properly would take constant adjustment – more time spent on fb – just so that i can make fb more appealing to me – and thus spend even more time there than i currently do.

It’s food for thought. We’ll see what happens in the next month or so as fb and g+ and their respective userbase evolves, and as i start to refine my thoughts about how the fb shift and my use of both platforms could potentially change. i know i’m not going to delete my fb, but it may be that it becomes just my virtual business card – an easy way for people to reach me if they don’t have my current info – and not much else.

The old fb profile page supported fb’s original paradigm that a person’s fb presence was predominantly about statuses. It’s true that on a news feed you get a glimpse of an entire breadth of a person’s fb activity, but when you clicked on a person’s profile page, what you were given was the person’s name and their status that served as what was essentially the “title” of the page. Any other fb activity was hierarchically and literally below that title of name+status.

It’s because of this that i generally prescribed to the no-more-than-one-status-every-twenty-fours-hour rule. to me, statuses had a degree of semi-permanence and importance over anything else that i did on fb as it related specifically to the fb paradigm. importing blog entries, posting up youtube links, even fb photos served more as a conduit, something in which fb was the engine but not the main source, whereas fb statuses *was* essentially facebook.

The new fb profile page abandons putting status messages as a part of the person’s “name title”, and for me that represents a huge hierarchical shift, demoting statuses to an equal level of all other fb wall activity. Statuses no longer stick out over links, photos, game feeds, &c, so amongst a wall where all of that activity is happening, they get lost in the shuffle instead of being immediately in your face.

Resultingly, i feel like my main focus as a fb user has lost its appeal. I still like using fb as a conduit for my other primary residences on the internet and i like keeping up with other people on my wall, but my own status use feels like it’s diminished greatly without that semi-permanence and my conduit use was starting to trend towards overtaking my statuses in any case.

So i’ve decided to do something that i never thought i would do: open a twitter account. twitter is going to completely replace my fb statuses (as in i’m no longer going to do any facebook statuses or at least going to try very hard not to). the original intended twitter paradigm also makes me psychologically feel okay tweeting multiple times in a twenty-four hour period, so chances are i’ll be doing that.

I’m also making a deliberate choice to not import anything relating to my twitter to my fb page. As twitter is essentially the same thing as a fb status, it doesn’t make sense for me to abolish the concept of fb statuses as a main fb focus only to import what could be perceived as a fb status in a conduit format. Particularly since i intend on tweeting more often than i update fb statuses, i have no interest in spamming my friends’ news feeds with that content. fb is better served as my blogs conduit where at most i’ll write twice a day and rarely that. if people are interested enough in my short thoughts, they can get it directly by subscribing to my tweets.

we’ll see how my use of twitter evolves over time, what sort of stuff i may opt to emphasize in my tweets versus others, if at all. I may also just for fun intersperse a random meaningless fb status every once in a while just to throw people, or maybe install one of those rotating fb status things and put up a bunch of nonsense. that kind of fits my sort of aesthetic.

since then, i’ve been much more open about letting any random high school acquiantance or former friend into my… “facebook life” as a self-psychological experiment, which is too complicated to get into with this entry. And since i’ve started doing this, a particular line of thinking has come into my brain having to do with the difference between facebook users of my high school/college generation versus the current high school/college generation.

For me, seeing these faces come back onto my radar in little snippets slowly but continuously feels like a very time-stretched version of the 10-year or 20-year high school reunion – and those sort of reunions have always seemed odd to me. After high school, i don’t hear anything from some of these people and then a decade later, the fact that we went to the same high school and maybe had passing conversations in the hall or were in classes together during a highly developmental time in our lives is supposed to be some sort of relevant “common ground” to shake hands?

One thing that facebook has taught me about this is that at least in an online concept, going through that is not merely not as painful as i thought it would be, it’s actually fun. i’m so fascinated with people and their experiences in general that any excuse to see where people are in their lives and the direction their paths take is awesome and valuable even if they’re strangers, so having some background on even casual acquaintances and where they are now is fascinating. But with some people, i scratch my head as to why they would be interested in anything about *me*; in my head, i’d be thinking, “who are you again?”, or “didn’t we talk maybe twice in the whole time we were in high school?”, or “didn’t you think i was a total loser?”

granted, again, all of us are in different places than we were, and so maybe the reinteraction is a reflection of that.

I’m tangenting again. The point is, people who use fb that are in high school and college now will never have that “stretched out 10-year reunion” sort of feeling. Facebook takes away that potential whether negative or positive to link to a past that was forgotten because facebook makes it much more difficult to create a true “past”. Ten years from now, they’re not going to be suddenly contacted and friended by people that they haven’t heard from in all that time since high school/college. Instead, ten years from now, they would have been casually reading through ten years of status updates, and casually looking at ten years of photos.

i feel like there’s a significant long-term implication about that, and i’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe just that people who are a part of the current fb generation get more of a blur between what their past is to their present. The cynical side of me thinks that this can be problematic. i’m certainly not the same person now than i was in high school, and some of what i put into the past i want to keep in the past. Seeing how people are now after the decade gap is fine because i see them more the way they are now and how they’ve changed, so they don’t feel as much a part of my past as much as a different form and hybrid version of the present. But with people now, what happens when they change, when their lives meander down different paths and they don’t feel connected to the friends that seemed so important to them in those years? Do they defriend them on fb? ignore them?

And that’s another difference between the current internet generation versus the past non-internet generation: before, when people went their separate ways, it was more acceptable to fall out of contact simply because keeping in contact wasn’t an easy task. Now, even when people move to the other side of the world, the internet can keep them connected whether they want to or not, and there’s almost this internet social stigma, a pressure to not lose touch with people who they may only vaguely know or relate to. You defriend someone on facebook and it can cause drama and turn an anthill into a mountain. “why did she defriend me? are we not friends anymore? do i ask? what does it mean? do we no longer say hi when we pass in the hall? do i not call or invite her to a party if i come back into town visiting?” as if the concept of “friend” on facebook or LJ or anywhere in that “slice of life” paradigm actually is necessarily equivalent to a real friend.

For me, i still have a fairly clear understanding that fb is a mere touchpoint of what actual human interaction is supposed to be about. That said, i do accept it more than i used to because honestly it is kind of nice to see what people from my past are up to and how they’ve changed (or maybe it should be more accurate to say how they present themselves as changed). In the long run, though, it can still feel cheap, especially because since i’m not always the greatest at getting back to people nor sometimes being the most organized about important things, fb can make it seem like those shortcomings are amplified, and that may be somewhat true, but some of it is also sijmply that the more people i get exposed to on fb, the more my people energies can potentially get spread too thin.

—

Originally posted on darkblog resonate.  I welcome any thoughts or comments there.

oops.

i guess this hurts me more than anything else as i don’t know who’s linking my stuff prior to now, so i’m not too worried about it.  it just makes me feel like an idiot for not getting it until now.  this entry is thus the public dunce cap on my head that i’ll bravely wear for a little while as now i know better.

it’s tempting to create some sort of regular feature to this blog such as weekly telly show reviews or something, but i’m not sure that i want to be confined to that sort of structure, nor do i want to alienate readers who may not be interested in some of the geeky telly culture that i’m a part of.  We’ll see, though.  If i have strong feelings about upcoming things that i’m watching that i feel warrants a Resonate sort of entry, i’ll probably post it.

it is my blog after all, right?  i’m not sure what the heck i’m babbling about.

the design of my banner went through a lot of failed attempts. the original idea was to take a particularly visually appealing portion of one of my modern-notation pieces and contrast-gradient the music into the existing gradient background. The problem with that is when you move a black foreground and a white background gradually to a white foreground and a black background, the middle foreground grey matches the background grey. can’t have that.

So i cut up parts of the music into three segments and tried to place them in such a way that they would flow from left to right, but it was too disjunct and too busy no matter what i did with the colors and the positioning. Unsatisifed, i nixed two of the segments and kept the accelerando and started fiddling with its placement. The original placement was smaller than what you see, gradienting to a stark white and existing below the “darkblog resonate” header.

The problem with that is that it left the middle very empty. Putting other music there had already proven to be unsuccessful, so i tried putting something else there, a textured treble clef not unlike the treble clef that I have in my livejournal icon, but after a week or so of looking at it and getting some general guidance from katie, it was determined that that just didn’t fit the bill.

I *think* i’m happy with the final design, for which i can thank katie for guidance. expanding the accelerando figure to encompass more of the screen and changing the gradient from a complete white to a spotlight grey feels more subtle and less intrusive.

i think that’s the 01:30 entry you’re going to get. As a “Grand Opening!” blog entry i think i pretty much failed, but i’m pretty happy with the bio page, so that makes it okay. If you haven’t read it yet, do, because it explains why i decided to create this blog in the first place.

and yeah. welcome to my new world.