Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
Today, spend a little time cultivating relationships offline. Never forget that everybody isn't on social media.
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media:1 Post content that add value2 Spread positivity3 Create steady stream of info4 Make an impact5 Be yourself
If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.
Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.
Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.
Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.
In the digital domain trust is now important not only because we really need to know how to trust people and whom to trust but because we need others to trust us and have to learn how to help them do so.
Now, see, that's why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.' Dovey's phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. 'The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn't agree with you, all that's left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
People often ask if I pay my speakers to speak. No I don’t. If you are able to explain the benefits of the virtual summit to the speaker (which we address in chapter 5) then it will be easy for you to get the caliber of speakers you want.
I know for a fact that no matter where I go, the memory and the suffering of not being with you will cripple me. I will go to work, fire up my PC, only to check if you're online. I will hover the pointer to your name, it will pop your contact details--just the contact details, no photo, no one-liners, no sign of what we used to have--but I shall linger and stare at it for hours. I will attempt to start a chat, but will close it without even a word to type. I will try to divert my thoughts back to work. But will fail. I will always go back to you. One hour to another, it's 5 PM. I pack my things, unproductive for the day and smile. I'm doing that again tomorrow and the next.
Think before you click. If people do not know you personally and if they cannot see you as you type, what you post online can be taken out of context if you are not careful in the way your message is delivered.
I dinnae get people, like they all want to be watched, to be seen, like all the time. They put up their pictures online and let people they dinnae like look at them! And people they’ve never met as well, and they all pretend tae be shinier than they are – and some are even posting on like four sites; their bosses are watching them at work, the cameras watch them on the bus, and on the train, and in Boots, and even outside the chip shop. Then even at home – they’re going online to look and see who they can watch, and to check who’s watching them!
It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.
It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones. There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.
Mika: Sometimes I just feel like you don’t want to be like this with me.Letti: Like what with you? You have no idea how much I want to be with you Mika.Mika: So, why don’t I feel it?Letti: :( What do you want me to do? You want me to tell everyone online that I’m with you? You want everyone to know how much I love you?Mika: I don't care about what people know, I just care about you. I want you in my life now and in the future, but how can I continue if you don't even "belong" to me...
Does this mean that religious consumption will increase online? That could be. We do not know yet, but to expect religion to disappear because of online technology is like expecting people to stop listening to music because Napster, Spotify and Wimp are offering us all the music we want online