Twitter

I have been holding out for a while now, but yesterday finally signed up for Twitter.  revdalan is me if there are others of you out there who want to follow my jottings.

Already I have added Tweetdeck for my laptop and TinyTwitter for my phone - though without an unlimited data option I have left it on manual updating!

The question that I have is how will I manage the additional stream of information coming my way?  And I don't know the answer to that!   Yet.

The other question is how I will handle the visibility.  I try to control too much (even though I know I can't!) and I think Twitter will help me learn to deal with that.  After all, if I am broadcasting my thoughts to the world (as I suppose I do on this blog) I am letting go of control, and somehow with Twitter it seems more so than blogging - not sure why.

What experiences do others have in this space?

Working from Home and Social Media

Not my office - far too little paper around for that!

I was sparked into thinking about working from home by this blog post.  Although I work from home, and have the issue of not having colleagues working alongside me at least in this church we say morning prayer together every day and have the opportunity to chat afterwards.

However, I am not going to blog on work - I have done that a reasonable amount already, but on my observations on social media.  Perhaps unsurprisingly I know a lot of vicars!  A subset blog and Twitter and Facebook and one of the things that I have noticed is that particularly blogging and Twittering (no I don't tweet) build communities and provide a a virtual neighbour for that displacement activity which is essential when that sermon just has to be written (like now!).  This is far from a scientific observation, but I am starting to wonder whether the growth in these media is in part down to the reduction in community in the workplace, providing a virtual community which will still be there when the current job isn't.

However, it can also be very addictive and at present I don't have time to tweet and don't feel the lack of community - although either of these might change!

Empathy and Bullying

What is it that allows Social Media to be used for bullying?  I have argued that Social Media is not a bad thing, and I stick to that.  However, I have been thinking more about the stories that I posted on Good Friday.  One factor which I believe has to be there is a lack of empathy.  If the persecutors and those who supported them had empathy they surely would not be able to do this unless there were some other factor.  That other factor might be peer pressure - but why does this only ever seem to be present in unpleasant cases?  Where is the peer pressure to do something good?

Is there something about our current society which is decreasing the amount of empathy about?  Whilst I have not been one for censorship I do wonder whether violent video games numb the senses - but we also spend an increasing amount of time alone - how are we going to learn empathy if we do not spend time with other people finding out how they actually feel?

Similarly I hadn't realised that I was anti advertising, but this is the second post (first one here) in which I question the impact that the advertising driven consumerism has on us.  It is all about ME!  And who cares about anyone else.

I am starting to sound like Mary Whitehouse, someone I thought was a terrible advert for Christianity when I was younger.  What might perhaps will stop me falling too far in that direction is that I don't think censorship is the answer.  If Jesus came to bring life in all its fullness then perhaps the best way to deal with this is to model something better - after all, I am not convinced that the people doing these things are happy.

Social Media Manipulation

Tomorrow we will know if it has worked!  What do you make of the attempt to get Delirious? or the Wurzels to top the charts following on from Rage Against the Machine at Christmas?

This is not a rant against social media - I believe that social media have a valuable place in society - it is a question about what people choose to do with them.

However, I can see nothing wrong with this use - after all, what have the record industry been doing for years?  In this case all that has happened, as has happened with blogs, is that something previously restricted to the few is now open to everybody - and is more transparent.  The danger is that big business will jump on the bandwagon - as they have with viral ads - and there are signs that this is already happening (I read a report about children as young as 11 being rewarded for recommending products on a Facebook like web site, but I can't find it - anyone else know where it is?).

Personally I deplore the manipulation - what is the point of a "fixed" chart - but did we ever have an unfixed one?