This week we experienced the passing of a former student from our campus. It is the one event that I hoped to never encounter as a student executive. The logistics of how to deal with the death of a student are complicated, and they become more difficult when the person who is gone is someone that you considered a friend.

When the news hit me, it was several days after learning that a colleague’s son had passed away. I didn’t know of the relationship at the time and when I realized through a post on Facebook, that I knew him, I was left staring at my laptop unable to process the connection. A few days earlier we had discussed in class the difference between being notified of a death via cell phone and landline. I had been notified, by chance, via text on a screen and a video from the dance class that I took with this person.

The ways in which we grieve have been shifted by online interactions. Prior to online community the grieving process was carried out either as a group, or as a single person. The option now exists to grieve in private, while experiencing community in an online platform. Memorial pages are created, where friends and family can post thoughts and prayers, or share stories about the individual. When a famous person passes away, Twitter will light up with hashtags and condolences. But how much does the internet actually contribute to the grieving process and is it hurting or helping those who remain?

I ask this as I create an event on Facebook, notifying the students of a campus memorial. In some ways it feels fake and cold. My filters are turned to maximum as I struggle to create sentences that correctly identify not only the time and place, but the place that the individual still holds although he is no longer here. How do I make this not about me, or the student association, or the venue in which the memorial will take place. How do I tell people about it without resorting to marketing tactics that are designed to bring in large groups? How do I maintain the humanity in an online space?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/17/death-social-media-grief-facebook-twitter-text

Like the writer of the above article, I think that we are still trying to figure out how to grieve online. Stratification of communications may have increased the intricacy of the social web, but it does not discount the fact that we still need a place to grieve, or as Inside Out puts it, we still need to be blue. How we blue will be an ever changing process, shifted by cultural expectation and norms, but the need to blue will remain.

It is 8:01PM

I was going to blog this week. I had every intention of falling down a rabbit hole and coming out the other side with some long, academic, incredibly fascination explanation for why we post negative things about ourselves online. I even have a painful episode of What About No? that was going to be edited and posted by exactly 8PM tonight. It is now 7:50 PM and I have nothing.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time within the 17” screen of my laptop. Between school, work and my extremely not exciting Instagram account (you can follow me at buffyontheverge…just sayin’), I estimate that I spend 8-10 hours a day online or staring blankly at word files that will one day become actual research papers.

So with just 6 minutes left on the clock to post this blog entry, I’ll explain why I have nothing.

I was playing UNO with my 7 year old.

She has been begging me to play all week and I keep putting her off because I am in the middle of fixing up a house, planning a move, midterms, and everything that the day to day life of a mom/student/employee can throw at a person. So I made a decision. I have no links, no videos, and have not edited for wordiness.

#sorrynotsorry

A couple weeks ago I was reading You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. Lanier asserts that before a person endeavors to interact with the online community and other netizens, they need to not only know who they are, but need to know how to retain their own weirdness so that they can avoid creating an online persona that simply fits within the templates that already exist online. Retaining our weirdness is not only what sets us apart from others, but it is also what drives the online sphere forward in an organic way that defies the rules set in place by software.

So how do we encourage children who are, thanks to interactive games such as Minecraft and Roblox, becoming a stronger online presence? How do we encourage them to retain their weirdness and avoid the templates that have been preconstructed? My son has spent hours studying the onscreen habits of the gamers that he idolizes. When he talks about gaming, he mimics their speech habits and gestures. I asked him recently to tell me who he was and his immediate response was “I’m a gamer!” After explaining the difference between the thing that you do and who are at your core, as a human being, he didn’t have much response. I did however give “empathetic” as an example of a descriptor and he laughed out loud, “That is NOT me!” I have to agree. He is not much for empathy. I consider it progress that he recognizes this fact about himself, without anyone having to point it out.

I grew up in the 90’s, wandering all over the city with my friends sans cell phones. We didn’t use Google to do our homework and we still had to call our friends on the land line if we wanted to meet up. If you were really lucky, your parents had two phone lines so that when you used the internet your Mom didn’t freak out when the dial up screeched in her ear while trying to call your Grandma. For me, the 90’s were a time of great music, increased freedom and puberty. It was also the decade where online interaction became a real thing. I frequented chat rooms, learned how to delete my history and flirted with guys in glamourous far off places like Finland and Singapore. I didn’t really know who I was, but there was also a certain thrill that came from either creating an online persona that I could try on just for a while. I also appreciated the times when I could vomit my reality into words and send them off into space. Sometimes I got an empathetic response, sometimes not. Everything was pixelated, bright and slightly off. Bugs were normal and we brushed them off. I like how Jon Westenberg describes the internet of the 90’s in his short essay The Internet Is Allowed To Be Weird. Why I Love Tumblr:

"Things were definitely wilder and weirder. The internet that I first fell in love with was a weird place. It was full of animations and glitches and bad design and it felt a little like the inside of the Grateful Dead's brains." 

I don’t feel that same uniqueness anymore. Yes, I now have access to thousands of apps, free software and YouTube tutorials. But I miss the weird. I miss being able to BE weird on the internet. Now I have to run my words through a dozen filters based on who may or may not see what I am posting. My online identity is watered down and basic. By the time I run through my filters, be it familial, political or employment related, my online persona has become fluff. If I were color, it would be ecru. It is so bland, that even beige is too out there of a color. I have lost my weirdness. I mourn my weirdness. The only weirdness I have retained is my talent for incredibly awkward summary paragraphs. I suck at those.

As What About No? progresses, I am struggling to balance this for my children. Modeling a behaviour is the best way to pass on a behaviour, but I have caught myself many times turning down an idea based on how it runs through my filters.

Do I want my kids to know that the filters exist? Yes. They are not all bad filters. Filters are necessary. However, they should not filter to the point that they no longer recognize themselves online. I would rather they be the creators of templates. 

We'll be back right after this flu shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5puB_7Q2n74

Jaron Lanier brings up some interesting points when it comes to the monetization of Facebook – particularly the concepts surrounding the increase of tangible wealth for the users. I have heard many accounts of how social media users are being paid by affiliate partners to market brands or ideas, building on the increasing consumer desires within the online world. It was never something that I paid much attention to until a friend introduced me to her Instagram account, and showed me how she uses endorsements to earn a small paycheck. My son envisions a future where he is able to pay the bills with the earnings from a YouTube channel, but he and I are both vastly uneducated in this area. I know it exists, but how does a person get from YouTuber, to earning as a YouTuber?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlrYMoHsXfs

This YouTube video, by CTNtechnologynews, explains the basic math behind earning on YouTube. Essentially, it all comes down to viewers and their behaviour when dealing with the advertising that they view on your channel. The reality is, earning enough on YouTube to pay the bills, takes more than just having a channel and posting regularly. Gaining a solid viewer base takes time, effort and a willingness to engage in marketing that ensures you are gaining and keeping viewers long enough to gain solid subscribers who are willing to click on those ad ribbons.

What About No? has a whopping 4 subscribers, and at the time of this post, 86 views on the single video that has been posted so far.  Why is there only one post? Time is only answer we have. Between travel for work, school, and an extremely fun flu bug that made its way through our house, we simply have not had the time to make another video. The channel is not a priority, making it difficult to put in the full effort that is required.  Are we going to stop? Of course not. That would be a downer, in so many ways. We just need to get back on schedule and make it happen. Do we expect to get rich off this? Not really. Just rich in family love. 

Our 4 subscribers would be so proud of our determination.

Don't Read the Comments

The other day, we received our first comment on What About No? I expected a couple comments from friends and family, but this one was actually from a complete stranger and it seemed like this would be a good time to open a dialogue with Conroy about the comments sections on social media. While his goal may be to have his own YouTube channel one day, my goal is to transition him into the word on online interactions with as much information and explanation as possible. While I am loathe to be described as a helicopter mom, there are some areas of life where a little more guidance is necessary, like calculus and sex.

DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS.

It is the single most noteworthy advice to heed when perusing social media and yet, it is the one piece of advice that I just cannot seem to follow. Give me an article with a good click-bait title, some sensitive topics and a dash of controversial viewpoints and I will not be able to stop myself from scrolling to the bottom of the page just to see what other people think.

Let me be very clear here. I do not read the comments in order to adjust my thinking. I do not read the comments to validate my own opinions. I do not read the comments because I think that everyone who posts a comment actually believes what they are posting (trolls unite!) and I do not read the comments in order to get my daily dose of drama (I watch enough K-Drama’s to cover that).

I read the comments because the online interactions of people, when granted a degree of anonymity, is simply fascinating. I am more than aware of the fact that the person who touts equality may in fact be a raging racist in real life and the person who suggests that the author should just die is actually super bored with their existence and is looking for a reaction – any reaction. I am more curious as to why we create these online constructs of ourselves and why some people, more than others, are prone to creating completely alternate online personalities.   

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/the-good-and-bad-of-using-different-online-personas

The link above is to Common Sense Media, a Los Angeles based organization that strives to educate youth without the fallback scare tactics that have been used in the past. Instead, teens are encouraged to work through scenarios within social media that they could encounter at any time, while at the same time looking for evidence to back up their thought processes and conclusions.

As a parent who actively coaches their children online, I found the approach to be refreshing. I would rather walk my kids through the online world, giving them the tools to make sound decisions, than attempt to hide the reality that is the internet from them. 

This week in class we discussed communication. Actually, we discuss communication every week. That tends to happen in a class titles “Social Stratification.” If some hapless student were to wander into our class at any given moment, it would look like chaos. Desks are scraped across linoleum floors to create something that we intended to look like a circle, but really resembles a misshapen uterus. Cell phones and laptops are splayed across surfaces. One student has pulled two desks together and is lying on her stomach, propped up on a worn backpack. Another has opted to crouch in her chair as the conversation flies back and forth, multiple steams of communication operating at the same time. The professor is pulling a clip up on YouTube about privacy and how cctv’s are documenting our every move. A vlogger is giving a tutorial on how to use makeup to avoid being recognized on said cctv’s. In another corner of the circle two students are madly searching their social media feeds to find that one item that relates directly to the class. In the opposite corner a lone student sits with their eyes closed and earphones in, taking a moment to focus.

It looks like chaos.

So does communication on the internet.

Yet, it is all connected.

Connected by fine lines and blips of information that come and go, the chaos within the room is broken up by small periods where everything intersects and we all burst out in laughter at a miscommunication due to the dual use of the spoken words gays vs gaze. Here the communications between 10 vastly different people collides and spills forth in a bubble of excitement as the verbal wires that crossed untangle for a split second and we are all brought together in the solidarity that brought us to this place.

This is the level of communication that is used now across the globe. Our communications cross and intersect, mashed into a mess and then one by one we unravel the chaos and come to understand the way that all of our communication comes down to one small intent.

This is how I view social stratification. Global stratification is causing us to cross our wires and misunderstand but over time the strands are separated, organized and understood, solving whatever problem was at hand. It’s social poetry, the decoding of humanity. It’s beautiful.

What About No?

As part of my course work, I have embarked on an unusual adventure. My son and I have started a YouTube Channel together, "What About No?"

For Conroy, this is his first foray into the world of social media. He had been begging me to get him set up on YouTube for months. I finally agreed, but on one condition, that we do it together. This experience will be the primary subject of my final research paper for my Social Stratification class, and by the time we are done with this little experiment, Conroy should be ready to launch his own channel with some sense of agency. Enjoy the channel, and watch us as we explore the world of vlogging.