“Brevity is for the weak”. So here we go…

1

Is rambling dead?

Conciseness is the secret to successful blogging, if we’re to believe the consensus of the bloggerati, a mass of attention of free time looking for the next issue to create into a meme and drive into the ground.

• Is it because of the volume of content competing for our attention?
• Is it because we lack the ability to focus for a long period of time?
• Is it something worse, that in outsourcing our brains we’ve lost the ability to develop and hold trains of thought?

Rambling is fun; imagine the days of long, rambling, all-night boozing sessions, with long-winded tales of yore bandied about the fire in the dying smoke and the tightening grip of a foggy mind.

Is that all Twitter is, a shared, archived, public, asynchronous bull session around the digital fire?

2

How many conversations do you have today that result in a reminder to look something up on the web later? How many conversations are interrupted with an attempt to either confirm, deny or research an assertion?

How many bar bets are settled instantaneously?

When you read a book, are you constantly looking for the hyperlink, for the verification of fact, or looking for a worm hole to distract yourself?

3

What’s new about a “personal brand”? A personal brand is merely a consistency of character, personality, behavior and actions that defines who we are and how we are perceived. What’s different is:

• We have an expanded capacity to “talk”: we can attempt to create personal brands in the same way marketers have always tried: by saying rather than doing.
• We have an expanded capability to use media to promote ourselves. “Social media” is really “personal” media.
• We can reach more people. The best products aren’t “viral”, they “go viral”. If you only care about spreading your message, good luck. The only way to spread your message is to solve one person’s problem, then another’s, then another’s, then another’s, and help to connect and amplify the many signals reverberating about you.

4

Do you ever think about the digital weight that you’re creating? Do you ever feel like you’re creating a past that you won’t be able to escape?

How traumatic would it be to break up with your “digital you”?

Oddly enough, instead of breaking up, deleting and starting new, we just ignore half-completed profiles, leave digital scraps all over the web. Who is going to clean up? Google? Google finds all the scraps and reminds us what we’ve forgotten. Facebook? Facebook stores our scraps, ready for us if we ever want to return.

Will you? Could you even click delete? Could you detach yourselves from your carefully made profile? Could you break up with your digital you?

5

It’s difficult to disappear, resurface and remake ourselves, unburdened by the digital weight of our lives.

The ability to remember everything is the same as being unable to forget.

Instead of abandoning our lives’ digital tracks and making new, fresh trails, we merely re-route them, create branches, making new trails bigger than the ones before. Oh wait, that one? Forget that one, that doesn’t lead to anything new. This one is new, this one is better, you’ll get something out of this one.

We used to live in world of rumours, of people being able to drift geographically, cutting off ties and changing themselves, recreating their lives with their new physical surroundings.

But today we carry our ties with us everywhere we go; even if we can’t reach out to them exactly then, we know they’re not far away, we know the network is still buzzing behind us, that we can catch up on it later, that we have an indelible history of the outsourced brain standing ready for instant verification of the fact (and the half-truths, the myths and the lies, all categorized, sourced and annotated).

6

The only way to hide online is in plain sight.

It’s impossible to hide from the web entirely, others will create references to you, out-of-context jokes about a mysterious person without a hyperlink. People are always making decisions about you, even if the decision is to ignore. And if there is only a sliver of information available about you, people will be making decisions about you on the smallest bits of information.

The only way to fight back, to present the rest of the story, is to participate; to create a broader picture of yourself.

Once you participate, it’s your choice how to present yourself.

On the Internet nobody knows if you’re a dog: but everybody knows if you’re an idiot.

7

We create online lives which may bear no resemblance to our offline lives; interconnected or not, both are our “real” lives.

We become who we want to be in a medium that we attempt to control, only to learn that we really can’t.

Sometimes the funniest, most engaging people digitally just aren’t able to show that side of themselves outside the digital realm; character, personality, wit and “charge” manifest itself in different ways online and off. We engage differently in private and public settings, and the web is nothing if not a public realm, whether we acknowledge it or not.

It’s a different code, a different culture, with different values, different languages, expectations and values and actions. The value of link, the code of linking, based on the ethical code of citing your inspirations.

8

If everyone likes you or agrees with you, or thinks you’re brilliant, or thinks you’re stupid, then you just haven’t met enough people, you haven’t found the right group, you haven’t found your echochamber.

Pity the person who bounces between echochambers, lost from the grounding of unwavering self-confidence.

9

Digital communication still lacks real feedback, the lack of the digital analogues to the pats on the back, the waves, smiles, firm handshakes, cold shoulders, nods of the head, the blank expressions and all the other hints of body language that mean everything when you’re face to face or merely in the room with people.

(Even though I like and use emoticons, I recognize their limitations.)

Available web statistics are poor proxies for gauging the real impact.

If I could only see someone’s face when they’re reading something! I want to see the furrowed brows, the nods, the enthusiastic smiles, the shakes of the head. I wish I could see someone’s hands trembling on their keyboards, their smirks, feel their nervousness, the confidence in their eyes, the passion in their voices, the sarcasm dripping from their words, the great pauses, the rushing, tripping words stumbling out of their mouth, the poise, as I read their replies. I want to be interrupted when I’m wrong, stopped when I know someone understands so I can move on, adjusting my message and delivery to hold their attention instead of wasting my effort convincing them of something they already know.

If I could only hear the muttering, or the stumbling, or the confidence, or their pace, their poise; clever punctuation means less than powerful prose.

(Did you make it this far? First person to acknowledge they read this far by leaving a comment gets a postcard from the road.)

10

Did you watch Obama’s acceptance speech? If not, read Obama’s acceptance speech, and then listen to Obama’s acceptance speech, and tell me your reactions were the same. They aren’t, they simply couldn’t be.

Watch his speech, then read the speech; tell me that you don’t read it and attach your visual images to the words as you sound them in your head. You pause the same way; you intonate and stress words, phrases and thoughts based on the visual frame.

This is the promise of audio and video and the rich Internet experience, bringing back the lost power of non-verbal communication to the web. This is why the democratization of the tools to create video will be so powerful; this is why video-blogging and video-commenting hold such promise, albeit far unrealized, in improving the state of communicating on the web. This is why broadband is so important.

Everyone should be able to use YouTube as a personal stump, as a personal bulkhead, a “long headshot”.

We use the easiest tools of communication not because they’re the most powerful, but because they’re the easiest, the cheapest and the most available, but not because they are the most powerful ways to deliver our messages. They aren’t.

If you don’t ever think about how / when / why you should communicate something, you’re neglecting the true power of your voice.

11

Why do I do what I do? “Getting paid isn’t worth it.”