This is a half thought out idea which I’ve been pondering for a few days so don’t expect anything cohesive. I just want to work though it. Which is also the subject of the post in a nicely meta kinda way.
Reading the coverage of Help Me Investigate I was struck by how it was Paul Bradshaw‘s idea. Not because it was a surprise – it makes perfect sense for Paul to be behind it – but because I didn’t see it coming from him. I share an office with Nick Booth, one of the team, and am in fairly regular contact with Stef Lewandowski, the site developer, but I haven’t had a lot of direct social contact with Paul recently so I’d assumed, based on ambient observation, that Nick and Stef were leading it. This was probably because they weren’t able to talk about the project publicly and since I wasn’t really paying attention my assumption isn’t really an issue (had I asked it would have been made clear), but it got me thinking about how I perceive Paul based purely on his Twitter and blog posts.
It strikes me that Paul uses his social media presence to process stuff. If you simply judge him on his online output it seems incredibly scattershot, linking to anything and everything that comes his way that’s connected in someway to online journalism. Figuring out what Paul is up to by looking for patterns from this activity is futile. It could be anything.
But Paul is up to something. It’s his job to be up to something. What I’m seeing is swan from beneath. He’s gliding calmly towards a destination but I’m watching the frenetic paddling under the surface in closeup. I’m seeing the process with no idea of where it’s leading.
(As an aside, while writing that paragraph I was looking for the right word for “swan’s feet” so asked Twitter. Seems that unless you get really scientific there isn’t one – they’re just feet. I didn’t say what I need it for and any logical speculation as to what I’m up to will invariably be wrong.)
(And as a further aside, notorious bird-nerd Andy Mabbett has researched the issue and reports the correct term for swan’s feet is palmate. So I’m watching Paul’s palmate feet thrash away. Which is nice to know.)
A similar thing happened to me at the end of last year when I realised I had no idea what my immediate peers in the Birmingham Social Media scene were up to. We were all in regular contact through Twitter, etc and the frequent meetups for online types but for whatever reason the big stuff – the long term strategy if you like – wasn’t getting through to me. So we now try and formally meet up every month to make sure we’re not missing anything.
And then yesterday a blogging chum mentioned how he hadn’t written up anything from a rather important conference he’d been to, which was odd given he’s a blogger. I posited that he didn’t need to because he’d already processed the event in the bar afterwards. As far as he was concerned the stuff he’d collected in his head was now sorted so there was no motivation to blog about it.
If I look back through my blog most of the stuff that’s been useful to me was written because I needed to process, whether it was diary-style accounts of my day or, as I’m doing here, working through an idea. The key thing is I’m doing it in public using a conversational medium (whether it’s analogous to chatting in a pub or giving a talk to a group of people or something inbetween). And maybe one of the reasons my blogging has been thin on the ground of late is because I’ve been talking to people face to face about stuff more often lately.
Does this mean online conversation is inferior to offline? I’m not sure. It certainly seems to fill a gap – if I can’t process this face to face with another person then I’ll do it online. But I think it works the other way too. I’m less likely to raise a topic in an offline conversational environment (god, the terminology of this stuff get’s torturous!) if I’ve already worked through it on my blog.
Motivation and satisfaction seems to be the thing. You blog when you have a need to do so, because for whatever reason you can’t satisfy that need to understand something in any other way. And that need doesn’t have to be as defined as “I want to figure out whether blogging is a means to some end, not an end it itself”. It could be as simple as a need to connect with other people with no goal in mind other than fun.
We often say social media is about conversation, not about publishing. Often this is broken down to mean articles with comments and links between blog posts but perhaps it’s more complex than that. What is conversation “for”? Why do we discuss things? And when do we not discuss things?
My first thought when I saw your birds’ foot question on Twitter was the “graceful swan” analogy.
Their feet are “palmate” (adjective; per ‘A Dictionary of Birds’, Campbell & Lack, Poyser, 1985, p.326). There is no specific noun.
Another small victory in my campaign to turn all Birmingham Social Media folk in to birders ;-)
No sooner did I say that, than recall that some people refer to a swan’s feet as “paddles”.
Thanks Pete, what an interesting thinking-in-progress piece that helped me reflect on why I blog. When I was a print journalist a long time ago there was something about “people ought to know about this” … although I suspect it was more about the newsdesk might like it and other journalists might follow, supported by the illusion of a vast hungry readership.
As a blogger it’s a bit different: there’s no newsdesk, no “guaranteed” readership, and more response to be gained via Twitter.
So I think I’m often blogging because I have a theme or storyline in mind, and there’s an event, idea, connection I want to capture because it might be useful later. I’m writing linkable stuff (for me) without quite knowing where I’ll link back from. The best thing anyone said to me about my some posts I wote was “I never know how your piece is going to end up”. Nor do I …