Amy on Tweetabix

A wee while ago I answered some questions on my use of Twitter for the blog, Tweetabix, which features a number of interviews with those who tweet.  Now that I’ve defended my thesis, I have finally got around to sending in my answers, and I thought you might be interested to read the results.  Here’s a quick excerpt:

What aspects of Twitter do you love?

I love the immediacy of it – I love the fast-paced exuberance of information passing through finger-tips: the staccato beat of keyboards across the globe conveying information, sharing stories, linking to posts, images, tools, news.

If you would like to read more, please do head over to check it out, and if you want to submit an interview yourself, here’s how.

Please feel free to leave comments either here or over at Tweetabix & I’ll do my best to respond to you.

Enjoy!

Thesis Defended

After 4 years of research, I have successfully defended my thesis, Charting Habitus: Stephen King, the Author-Protagonist and the Field of Literary Production.  I’ve been asked to make some minor corrections and have been given a month to complete them, after which I will be awarded my doctorate in English Literature.

For those who are interested in the topic of the my thesis, here’s the thesis abstract:

While most research in King studies focuses on Stephen King’s contribution to the horror genre, this thesis approaches King as a participant in American popular culture, specifically exploring the role the author-protagonist plays in his writing about writing.  I have chosen Bourdieu’s theoretical construct of habitus through which to focus my analysis into not only King’s narratives, but also into his non-fiction and paratextual material: forewords, introductions, afterwords, interviews, reviews, articles, editorials and unpublished archival documents.  This has facilitated my investigation into the literary field that King participates within, and represents in his fiction, in order to provide insight into his perception of the high/low cultural divide, the autonomous and heteronomous principles of production and the ways in which position-taking within that field might be effected.  This approach has resulted in a study that combines the methods of literary analysis and book history; it investigates both the literary construct and the tangible page.

King’s part autobiography, part how-to guide, On Writing (2000), illustrates the rewards such an approach yields, by indicating four main ways in which his perception of, and participation in, the literary field manifests: the art/money dialectic, the dangers inherent in producing genre fiction, the representation of art produced according to the heteronomous principle and the relationship between popular culture and the Academy.  The texts which form the focus of the case studies in this thesis, The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story demonstrate that there exists a dramatisation of King’s habitus at the level of the narrative which is centred on the figure of the author-protagonist.  I argue that the actions of the characters Jack Torrance, Paul Sheldon, Thad Beaumont, Mike Noonan and Scott Landon, and the situations they find themselves in, offer an expression of King’s perception of the literary field, an expression which benefits from being situated within the context of his paratextually articulated pronouncements of authorship, publication and cultural production.

I’m extremely excited by the ways in which my research into the work & career of Stephen King can be applied to social media, and I’ll be exploring this through the blog over the coming days, weeks, months…

However, having now completed my doctorate, the job search begins in earnest.  If you are interested in working with me then please check out my About Amy page, connect with me on LinkedIn and get in touch via email on amypalko at madasafish dot com.

Online Networking & the Personal Touch

It doesn’t take much time or expend much energy, but lending the personal touch to networking really makes all the difference.  This is true, of course, to either your online or offline relationships, but for some reason, what comes naturally when engaging offline is so often disregarded online.

Natasha Phillips, in her comment on my launch post made an observation that I was combining the old with the new:

I love the mix of content, which encourages the progressive use of cutting edge gadgets (!) whilst at the same time paying homage to good old fashioned codes of conduct!

I honestly hadn’t thought of it in that way but it makes absolute sense to me.  Why would the practices that have served us well in the past not serve us equally well in the digital age?  When we meet someone face to face, we listen attentively, we read their facial expressions, their body language, the lilt of their voice, and we respond appropriately. In other words, we pay attention to the details.

Why should we behave any differently when we meet someone in a virtual environment?

It’s all too easy to look at your flock of followers and feel pride in your networking skills, but how much could you tell me about just one of those individual followers?  Their location?  Their profession?  Or maybe you can go one better.  Maybe that they have a whole menagerie at home.  They have a passion for vinyl records.  They’re looking for a 2nd hand car as their last one broke down on their way to work last week.

Knowledge of these kind of details can change a follower into a genuine connection.  As I suggested in my first post here, this is not something that you can generate overnight.  This is an ongoing commitment leading to durable, strong bonds between you and your community.  And it’s not something that you can fake either, as in all your networking, it is absolutely key to be genuinely interested in others – attention to the details is just one of those ways in which you can express your interest.  It’s one of the ways in which you can ensure you bring the personal touch to online networking.

And The Winner Is…

Yesterday was quite possibly one of my most exhilarating days spent online – the response to the launch was, to put it simply, incredible and exceeded all my highest hopes.  Thank you to all who visited, commented, retweeted and recommended.  I look forward to the conversations that we’ll have here and will endeavour to write posts that live up to all of your expectations!

Now, if you were one of those who commented before 12pm GMT today, then your name was entered into a prize draw to win a copy of the book Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income written by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, which was very generously donated by Chris.  This book is an absolute must if you are considering blogging for income, but is also very informative for those who wish to blog without monetization.  Highly recommended!

So, without further ado – the winner is…

Congratulations Ryan!  Your prize will be in the post shortly

Thanks again to all for making the first day of my new blog so special – exciting times ahead, I think!

Launch!

Welcome to the launch of my new blog!

It’s still very new, but please do have a browse through the pages and posts to find out more about the blog and me.  If you like what you see, please consider subscribing!

Rules of the Playground

Joanna Young over at Confident Writing wrote a post recently on why it’s worth sticking with Twitter which generated a huge amount of conversation.  One of the comments left was from Joely Black who writes:

The thing I like most about Twitter, that makes it so different from other online communication media, is the code of behaviour. In a sense it’s really old fashioned, but the demand that you show up authentically, that you don’t auto-DM people, that you don’t spam people, that all the conversations are public so you avoid the horrible stalky followers so easily.

Joely’s comment really chimed with me as it felt absolutely valid.  Twitter does function according to a set of codes which are regulated by the community.  It is, perhaps, the last bastion of old-fashioned manners.  Please and thank yous abound.  Attribution is closely observed.  Common courtesy (which is rapidly becoming less and less common!) is demanded from tweeters by tweeters.

Auto-DMs (Direct Messages) are an excellent example.  For a while, they were, if not actively encouraged, silently condoned and tolerated.  As numbers have increased within the Twitter community, it has become less and less acceptable to set your Twitter account to send a pre-written DM to all those that chose to follow you.  As this pattern of behaviour became increasingly condemned as lacking authenticity, respect and consideration, those continuing the practice were called out and unfollowed.

This, of course, is also the case for any other practice that is considered undesirable by the community.  Some of the outcomes of this are: a very vocal aversion to spam,  derision of soap-boxing  and a celebration of authentic connection.

To get on in the twittersphere you need to follow the rules of the playground.  They’re very simple: be polite, be considerate, and above all, maintain respect for other tweeters’ time, space and sensibilities.  In other words – PLAY NICE!

Tales of a Digital Flaneuse

The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins… These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.  The paths that correspond to this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.  It is as though the practices of organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness.

Walking in the City  – Michel De Certeau

As I move around cyberspace I am reminded of this quote from De Certeau derived from his essay Walking in the City, which itself is from a larger work called The Practices of Everyday Life.  First published in 1984, it sets out to interrogate the validity of the ‘increasingly sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry [that] privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic details – parts taken for the whole’.  It is at turns a philosophical, sociological and anthropological narrative that stalks the ordinary individual as they move through space, time, society and culture.

As I embody this figure, strolling around social media, inscribing my mark on digital palimpsests, generating paths and route maps through previously uncharted cyberspace, I inhabit the role of the digital flaneuse: a woman wandering.  Elusive, and yet traceable by my movements online, I evade apprehension by those who attempt to control through panopticism.  I operate at a level ‘below the thresholds at which visibility begins’.

And yet, as De Certeau qualifies, ‘it is as though the practices of organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness’.  As I engage in these practices, I am graced with a privileged viewpoint – a subjective understanding of the ways in which this space functions.  I, in collaboration with all other practitioners, organise this space.  We manage this amorphous city of bytes and ether, unhindered by those who would seek to control our movements.

We are the ordinary practitioners  – ‘the murmuring voice of societies’ – ‘a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one’.  It’s our connections to each other, those bonds between one individual to another, that defines cyberspace in the 21st century.

As one of those individuals, I connect, I create, I communicate.  I am a digital flaneuse: at once a part of the crowd and apart from the crowd.  An individual unto myself and a member of the masses.

It’s Not Or; It’s And!

There are so many social networks out there, with more and more launching every week.  With invitations flying through cyberspace to a whole host of emerging networks in alpha or beta testing, how do you decide which to accept and which to ignore?

When I’m faced with this decision, I recall a saying of my dad’s: “It’s not or; it’s and!”  This alters the situation entirely.  Suddenly I no longer approach these decisions considering, “I could join Plurk, or I could join Kwippy”.  Instead I think, “I could join Plurk and I could join Kwippy“. By adopting this attitude re-adjustment, I no longer operate from a position of lack, but of abundance.

Your response, however, may be that there’s not enough hours in the day to invest the time and energy required to establish strong connections within each individual community.  And you’d be right.  I’m not here to tell you to relinquish all ties with the offline world in order to cultivate multitudinous online communities!  But, I can think of many benefits in following the advice, “It’s not or; it’s and” when approaching social media.  You can:

• Direct traffic: By maintaining a profile on multiple social networks you can inform others of your blog/site/project etc.  You can use your profile as a promotional space, directing others to connect with you wherever you so wish.
• Ensure brand consistency: Claiming your username across a number of social networks will prevent others appropriating it.  Their reasons for doing so could be completely innocuous & coincidental, but they could also be maliciously intended to cause your brand identity harm.  For whatever reason, this can lead to confusion and a lack of consistency.  Maintaining the same username & avatar will limit any confusion.
• Strengthen already existing connections:  Different social networks focus on different aspects and interests.  For example, LinkedIn has a professional focus while Last.fm has a music focus.  By connecting with the same people on both, you learn more about your contacts and establish multiple points of commonality.
• Back-up: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  It’s a well-known saying, but with social media, this advice is so often ignored.  Let’s say you’ve limited yourself to a Twitter account; you’ve made lots of new contacts, re-established others and you’ve worked hard at nurturing these online relationships.  What are you going to do if Twitter was to disappear tomorrow?  What happens to your connections?  What happens to your online community?
• Experiment and play: Creators of social media are ceaseless innovators.  New networks tend to function in different ways, offer new ways of communicating and have many different features to explore.  Think of social media as a space of infinite possibility and take the time to investigate and play.  Who knows where it’ll take you!

While you may, and indeed should, limit your focus to a few networks for the majority of your community building, I think it makes sense to establish a presence on as broad a spectrum as possible.  A little effort goes a long way!

Slow & Steady Wins the Race

It may not be particularly dynamic or sexy, but slow, organic growth is the key to social networking.  So often formulas and techniques are suggested to build your network as fast as possible, but invariably these tactics are not embraced by digital communities.  By choosing to adopt these tactics, you may find that your motives are questioned and your commitment to authentic, genuine connection found lacking.

So what can you do to ensure that you continue to grow your following in order to foster strong relationships?  Well, I would like to suggest that the best way to do this is to invest time and energy in the networks you have chosen to focus on.  Search according to location, interests, profession, etc., check out the twitter packs wiki, add bloggers that you admire and ask your new contacts who they recommend.

However, unless you can show that you are an active member of the community, all of that effort will be wasted, and this is why you need to build slowly but surely.  By engaging in conversations, contributing meaningful content, linking generously, and participating in memes, you’ll soon discover that you’re attracting like-minded individuals as well as discovering interesting new contacts.

My advice – resist the urge to follow the social network equivalents of get-rich-quick schemes.  You’ll find it far more beneficial to take it slow and steady.