You know that metaphor about challenging times, where you talk about having to rebuild a plane while you are still flying it?
It's interesting how much social media feels like that, all the time. Right now I am having one of those moments where I feel like I am unscrewing the tail while rejiggering the wheels and talking to someone on the ground and, now, the metaphor is dying out.
Vintage Postage Stamp Social Media Buttons courtest of Dawghouse Design via Tutorial9.net
But suffice it to say, I'm just in the middle of a fairish-ly big life change—a new job—and it's making me stop and think about the accounts and channels and networks represented by the plethora of buttons on my toolbars, and just how to use them. And evento try to retrace how they got there, over the last few years of my life.
I started this blog on Typepad in January, 2007, after just having moved back to Boston from Washington, DC. As I went through that previous massive life change (city, job, friends, family), it was a way to reach out to a few people close to me but far away. It was also a way to create a practice around writing and reflecting, and a means to push myself to share a little of that work, against the grain of my tendency to put on a game face with much of the world. Even if the audience was only a few people. Even if it the audience was occasionally, only a theoretical one.
At times, I wove this space into my professional life, with occasional posts about the craft of web content, or, like so many others, used it to register a meta-comment on social media itself. But mostly I wrote about my life outside of work. Though, at the same time, I generally found myself to shying away from using it as a form of reportage. I've written about a hike, a film, a moment in political discourse or a glimpse of a neighborhood scene. But not, generally, about what I did at work this week, an argument in my family, worries about the economy or my bank account. Although, those realities must often have leaked through in what I did write, and especially in the many long gaps between posts.
I also played around with more then one version of a separate professional site. Much of the time, that amounted to just an online brochure, a way for people to look me up after professional contact, a URL to put on my business card. I added a blog to that site, too, eventually, only to find myself niggling with perfectionism, with self-consciousness, with adding the the great pile of already-good writers out there online, or conversely, becoming one more silly self-promoter churning out redundancies.
Along the way, along rose social media in all its power. I created my original Twitter account in May of 2007 and joined Facebook the same month.
In those days, the primary people I knew on Twitter were other people from my work life, who often tweeted about their companies and about the digital world, and the sort of gurus and experts I followed tended to be figures in the digital world, too. As time went on, I added more and more networking contacts from my field to my Twitter account, and often used my Twitter feed as a supplement to the sites and blogs I track in Google Reader—as a way to keep up with my field of knowledge and gain insights and ideas.
At the same time, the immediacy of Twitter led me to use it in a very different way—to tweet jokes and wise-ass comments to buddies, to comment on things I care about that have little to do with making a living, like photography or Boston neighborhood news. And I often, but not always, tweeted links to my personal blogs, even though this created a lot of ambivalence in my head: who was my audience? What did I want to share, and with whom?
The knowledge that lots of my work acquaintances were Twitter followers made me self-conscious about how I used the channel. In October 2009, I ended up creating a second Twitter handle only known to some online buddies, so we could bounce back and forth absurdities about TV and pop music and the more ridiculous elements of our lives. It's not linked to any of my public persona, and for that very reason has sometimes given me the space to be giddy, offensive, and carefree in a way that I choose not to be on my "real" social media, where I've long since become guarded and prone to second, third and fourth guesses.
Facebook, meanwhile, became a place that I kept meticulously free of my work-world, except for people I've known long enough that they know me primarily as a friend, and only secondarily as someone they've done business with. And yet, here, too, I was conscious of operating under a filter. With so many old school buddies, family members, and former co-workers as connections, and an increasing number of links to causes and organizations, I end up holding back on a great many events, thoughts, and emotions that I wouldn't share with any but those trusted few with whom I could share real sadness, or anger, or fear.
The funny things is, I think back at the start of all this new media, I may have had some Utopian ideas that some of these channels would allow me to be more "whom I am," more authentic, than the often stifling and anxiety-provoking media of the old-school informational world we grew up in: the tedious and shame-inducing resume, the bullets and tables and clip-art of the corporate document world, the impersonality of the professional journal.
I can see, in my own life and on my own screen, friends and peers of mine who are far more open, more brutally honest, more self-revealing in their personal blogs. Indeed, it's often those people whom I read most often, who give me inspiration or matter for thought and whose posts linger in my head. With Twitter, the world of identity and persona seems more sharply divided, between those who use their network primarily to connect on their life's work, with occasional homey posts on food, friends, family, and the like, the proverbial water-cooler, on one side, carefully curated with one's public self in mind. And on the other side, those (the great mass of Americans out there, it seems) for whom social media is an unbridled outpouring of Id and shame-free performance and opinion and emotion.
Meanwhile, over the course of the last two years in particular, social media has become something I do *at* work; blogging, Twitter and Facebook are all part of the portfolio of communications at my past clients and in my present new job. Their impact, their metrics, their future, their potential downsides, are something that weaves through every work day. Knowing more, having greater responsibilities, and contributing to the social media of organizations makes me at once more cautious, more thoughtful, and less personal in my relationship with the "post" button.
Perhaps the greatest benefit for me in my working life from all this posting, linking, and over-thinking is just the struggle itself. Having skin in the game. Experiencing the trial and error, the aha moments and those of frustration or embaressment, the fruitful periods and the droughts, of the medium. Without that continual effort, a hundred Powerpoints and business cases won't really give you insight into how these tools handle, and succeed, and fail.
Now the greatest questions of all for me, right now are around time. Or rather, time, attention, and purpose. Outside the office, I can't feed this machine as much as it seems to call for. I have a funky tool whose entire job is to help me track and manage all this stuff. I'm starting to experience social media guilt.
To ask for others' attention inherently assumes that I will spend care, attention, and affection on posts that they create, on what they have to share. There's terrific advice, examples, and data relevant to my work being posted in my networks everyday, conversations it would be great to join, leads to follow up on. There are moving and crucial and funny moments in the lives of people I care about, scrolling by.
But there are also physical conversations with touchable people I need to have. And books to read. And streets to visit. And a garden to dig. And photos that need more crafting. And writing to practice. And quiet meditations that need breathing into.
I'm not going to post something smug about getting unplugged or smelling the proverbial dewy rose. I'm not even sure I've decided to spend less time, in total, in my little social media booth. I just wonder how many others are feeling at a similar crossroads of the tiny, significant buttons? And if you have the answers, can you send my a DM?
