by Sandra Parshall
If an alien civilization, trying to learn more about Earthlings, tapped into Facebook, what concept of our society would they take away from it?
They would have no way of knowing that even in an online community of almost a billion, humans seek out like-minded people and quickly form communities of “friends” so they can shun those with differing viewpoints and interests.
Perusing one person’s timeline, for example, our alien peeping toms might conclude that virtually every human is currently producing, in a torturous manner, something called a book. And that a certain Robert Walker has produced more books than any other person on the planet.
Looking elsewhere, they might learn that the right to own an assault weapon capable of killing dozens of living beings in seconds is the single most urgent issue facing the United States, surpassing by a long stretch such minor concerns as war, climate change, and a struggling economy.
However, the most glaringly obvious fact they would learn is that humans are obsessed with other species and go so far as to share their homes with them.
They may find many mentions of “endangered” species, but will conclude from photographic evidence that Earth is overrun with black and white bears, to the point that every human possesses one.
They might assume that this is the most beloved individual animal in the world:
But not all of its kind – called “cats” – are treasured. Indeed, it seems that the greatest threat to Earth’s delicate ecological balance is not climate change or pollution or habitat destruction, but this vicious creature -- the reviled "outdoor cat."
Further clouding the picture where cats are concerned: Despite the outdoor cat's malicious nature, gentle animals called “dogs” apparently worship any cat they can get their paws on.
By the end of a single day, those curious aliens would also know the details of thousands upon thousands of meals consumed by humans in the past few hours, most of them containing a substance known as chocolate. And if we don’t tone it down a little, they might decide to come on over and try this magical nutrient themselves.
So be careful what you post. You can’t be sure who’s out there reading it and using your whims and quirks to make a decision to invade or avoid us.
Sandra Parshall
Update.
The word looks so innocent sitting there, doesn’t it? Friendly. Downright perky. Update! It promises something new and fun.
And it strikes terror into the hearts of everyone who has a Facebook account, with the possible exception of Beast (public figure), Mark Zuckerberg’s dog. I’ve been on Facebook a little over a year, and I’m still learning how to use it because they keep updating it.
I started out with my identity stated clearly on my Facebook page: Author of the Rachel Goddard mysteries (titles following). In the latest update, my identity vanished. I was able to dig down a couple of layers and add it again, but how many readers will go searching for it? Most authors on FB are there not because they have loads of free time to play online [pause while every working writer reading this rolls on the floor laughing/crying hysterically] but because it’s one more way to promote themselves and their work. Facebook’s update made it harder for anyone to learn that a particular person is a writer, and what kind of books he/she writes, and what the titles are. We’re spending a lot of our time there trying to figure out how to use new features and where to find material that suddenly disappeared in the latest update.
And the look of the site. Oy. Can we all spell u-g-l-y? I’m not sure FB’s operators can, or that they can define it. Customization is virtually impossible to achieve on FB. (Yes, I meant to use the word virtually.) Everybody’s page is just as clunky and utilitarian as everybody else’s. This, I suppose, is fair. It’s also annoying. What would be wrong with a little individuality? Would it make the server crash if half a billion people tried to tart up their pages at the same time? Probably. But a choice of templates, perhaps – would that be so much to ask? Maybe, considering that FB is free to users in exchange for being bombarded in subtle and not so subtle ways by ads. Free or not, though, we think of our Facebook pages as ours.
There’s the source of the problem: We get a lot of free space online, we use it every day, and we start feeling we should have some say in how it looks and works. We don’t. The owners have a right to “update” their sites and we retain only the privilege of saying Enough! I’m outta here.
Blogger, where Poe’s Deadly Daughters is published, has also been on an update kick over the past year or so. I like some of the changes, especially the Preview function – when it works. The new picture uploader, not so much. And I hate it when I hit the Enter key and suddenly find myself at the bottom of the blog post I’m trying to edit.
While I’m on the topic of updates, have you tried yet to use Microsoft Word 2010? If you’ve figured it out, please share your wisdom with me. I love Windows 7 – that was an update worth making and worth using – but Word is hostile territory to someone with my limited word processing needs. Ribbons within ribbons within ribbons. Hidden menus. Features that nobody knows about until they accidentally enable one and chaos breaks out in a data file.
Deliver me from the relentless stream of updates. Please. Or at least tell me where to get a brain update with an enhanced patience component.
What “update” has made your life more difficult lately? Which one has turned out to be an improvement?
Sandra Parshall
It’s just as we suspected: Google, Facebook, and Amazon really are trying to hijack our brains and take control of our lives.
By gathering information about our habits – where we shop, what we buy, where we vacation, the music we listen to, the books we read, and so much more – they’re building databases that allow them to nudge us toward specific products, restaurants, stores, etc. The collection process is called data mining or “reality mining.” And the best source of information about you isn’t necessarily your computer; it’s probably your smartphone. Data collected from a smartphone can track the user’s movements and build a detailed profile of that person’s everyday habits.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said recently that he believes most people “want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Google is gearing up to do exactly that.
Facebook may be way ahead of Google, though. FB already has connections to a legion of corporations and organizations, and clicking the little “Like” symbol on their websites delivers information to FB about your preferences and habits. More is coming: Recently Facebook paid a mere $15 million for a competitor, the social network called FriendFeed. Although FF is tiny (1 million users) compared to FB (500+ million), it already has something Facebook doesn’t: a built-in search feature for tracking all user activity. If the programmers plug this feature into the FB site, all your “friends” will be able to see everything you do on the internet. (Oh, look, my old pal Jack is visiting a porn site!) Something to look forward to, huh?
Most of the information-gathering is for commercial purposes, of course. Why would anybody bother with mass invasion of privacy unless there’s money in it? Many people are cooperating by putting FB apps on their smartphones, clicking “Like” on corporate sites, and tweeting relentlessly about their every movement and change of mood. Unless we’ve drilled down far enough to find the opt-out button, our FB friends can already see exactly where we are at all times. This information does not vanish into the ether and it’s not restricted to our friends. It goes into a database, and the data mining continues day and night, in real time.
Maybe we’ll reach the point where we never have to go shopping. Google, Facebook, and Amazon will know exactly what we want even before we do, and they’ll automatically charge it to our credit cards (of course they have the account numbers) and deliver it right to our doors.
Sandra Parshall
Facebook. MySpace. Twitter. Blogs. Websites. Internet listservs.
Somehow it has become an absolute necessity for writers to use them all, and use them frequently, in the hope of enticing readers to buy books. Like love-starved hermits hoping to make a human connection out there in cyberspace, we sit at our computers, tapping away, posting here and posting there, trying to hawk our books without actually sounding like we’re doing a sales job. Be interesting! Be funny! Be shocking, if you can’t be anything else! The whole point is to attract attention, make people want to know more about you — make people want to read your books.
I had a website before my first book came out. After some resistance, I joined other writers to start this blog. Heaven knows I’m on enough internet listservs. But I refuse to join MySpace, which I’ve always associated with teenagers and pedophiles. I held out against Facebook for a long time before I finally gave in recently. Twitter? No way. Okay, I have a Twitter account, I even have a couple of followers, but I have never tweeted. Not yet.
It’s astonishing how obsessed writers have become, in such a short time, with creating a “cyber presence” that readers will encounter at every click of the mouse or touch of a mobile device keypad. Look at the numbers, though, and you’ll understand why that potential audience is irresistible.
Try to absorb this fact (gleaned from the January/February issue of Scientific American Mind magazine): If Facebook were a nation, it would be the fourth most populous country in the world. (The U.S. is the third.) With more than 250 million members on every continent, six-year-old Facebook is way ahead of the older MySpace, which has 125 million users. Twitter has millions of users, but every source I’ve consulted gives a different figure. Is it only seven million or is it 75 million? Whatever — a lot of people are tweeting and following, and writers see them all as potential book-buyers. Facebook seems an especially promising source of new readers, because its fastest-growing membership segment is the 40 to 60-plus age group, more likely than the kids to spend money on books.
But does it work? Considering how much time social networking eats up, is this an efficient way for writers to reach readers? In the short time I’ve been on Facebook, I’ve noticed that most of the messages being exchanged are between writers who know each other — friends chatting about their daily lives. Most writers who have both personal Facebook pages and fan pages have a lot more friends than fans. Even in a universe as vast as Facebook, writers have formed an insular little society of their own. Facebook seems to serve the same purpose in writers’ lives that internet listservs do: providing relief from the isolation of writing. Anytime we feel the need, we can reach out and make contact online, tell somebody what we’re doing or thinking, find out what they’re up to (not much, usually).
In the latest issue of Publishers Weekly, nonfiction author Melinda Blau writes about her own experience with using social media for book promotion and confesses that, like many writers, she let it spiral out of control and take over her life. All her time online hyping her book hasn’t led to fame and fortune. Time to quit, she says. But she’s not giving up social networking entirely. She’ll do it just for fun now, not for book promotion.
I’m torn between wanting to do everything I possibly can to make readers aware of my new book (the title is Broken Places, and it’s out in February, in case you haven’t heard) and feeling a little desperate about spending time online when I could be writing. Because I’ve always been shy, online socializing and promotion has an undeniable allure. Where to draw the line is the question.
Are sites like Facebook useful only for socializing, or do they help writers find readers? What do you think? Have you ever bought a book because you “met” the writer on Facebook or MySpace? If you’re a writer, do you think social networking has helped you increase sales?
Sandra Parshall
What would Ernest Hemingway have said if he had tweeted?
What topics would Edgar Allan Poe have blogged about?
What would James M. Cain’s Facebook page have looked like?
It's difficult to imagine how writers managed to sell books in the pre-computer era. How did they get by without web sites? And weren't they awfully lonely without the internet?
The social networking and online marketing made possible by computers and the internet have become so much a part of the writing life that many of us feel we can’t have a career at all if we aren’t plugged in, tweeting, blogging, and constantly updating readers. Writers are everywhere on the internet, blabbing about ourselves. This has a definite downside. We’re like the movie stars who appear on public streets with torn jeans, two-day beards, and dirty hair.
The mystery is gone.
We have no secrets left because we’ve used them to fill the insatiable maw of the blog machine. We’ve written about our bad habits, our phobias, our food fetishes, our pets (alive and dead), our siblings, our parents, our spouses, our kids, the bully who beat us up in sixth grade, the teacher-nun who humiliated us in eighth grade, the waiter who served us with lukewarm coffee and a bad attitude, the drycleaner who ruined our favorite coat, our hangnails. If there’s anything left that our fans don’t know about our lives, all they have to do is wait. Eventually it will all become blog material.
And we complain, incessantly, that we don’t have enough time to write.
How easy the writing life was before the internet existed. Sit down at a typewriter and write – that was it. No e-mail to answer, no Twitter followers to connect with, no blog to produce, no web site or MySpace page to update. I can’t help wondering how certain writers from those pre-internet days would have coped with the demands made on 21st century writers.
Hemingway would have been a natural for Twitter. A limit of 140 characters per tweet? No problem for Papa. And he could have blogged about his six-toed cats. (Hey, I’ve blogged about Hemingway’s cats – see note below – so why wouldn’t he?) William Faulkner would have had a little more trouble with Twi
tter.
Truman Capote was born to blog – but born too early, alas. Imagine the feuds that inveterate gossip could have ignited, and kept going indefinitely, if he’d written a daily blog. Give Norman Mailer a blog at the same time and we’d really have something interesting going on.
What writers from the past do you think would have embraced today’s online promotional opportunities? Who would have fled in horror from the mere suggestion of blogging and tweeting?
If Agatha Christie had been addicted to blogging, would she have kept in touch during her mysterious 10-day disappearance?
Was Raymond Chandler a MySpace kind of guy, or would he have preferred Facebook?
Would Arthur Conan Doyle have named his blog for himself, or would he have called it holmesmysteries.com?
And what would Hemingway have said if he’d tweeted?
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NOTE: I wrote a while back about the USDA’s efforts to remove the 50 or so cats from the Hemingway property, now a museum, on Key West. (Please don’t ask how the Department of Agriculture became involved. I’m as baffled as you undoubtedly are.) If you haven’t read about the resolution already, you might like to know that the five-year battle ended with construction of a fence to keep the felines from wandering off the grounds. Most of the cats are descendants of Snowball, a six-toed cat Hemingway received as a gift in 1935. The USDA concluded that they are healthy, happy, and well cared for by the museum staff.
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