It's Not Personal

It's Not Personal

Some people have a problem with rejection. I hope you are not one of those. But thanks to 'Social Networking' that rejection reaction can now extend to not accepting goofy invitations to join in real causes or virtual games. If you are on one or more of the big sites, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., you have probably seen something of this, already.

You sign up to sites like these to catch up and keep up with old friends, family and coworkers, innocently enough. As they each become more familiar with the network, they start leaving little Twitter-like updates. "John is looking forward to the weekend" and "Terry is heading to lunch with Erin" and "Kim has had it with spyware!". Okay, not bad. You have to be on-site to get these updates and they quickly scroll-away into the ether like the empty calories they (mostly) are.

But very quickly, it seems most people buckle under some kind of pressure to treat their updates almost like some kind of performance art. There is pressure to be Funny or to be Deep or to be Quirky. The updates start to become more along the lines of "Luis thinks every movie should star Adam Sandler" and "Brad has decided he needs a new truck". And if you are blessed to be on a network that allows developers to build little web applications and plug into the network's API, you soon can be trading wishes, feeding unicorns, finding out What Kind of Kisser are You? and comparing each others' taste in books and movies and TV. Hmm... What kind of car are you?

It's actually possible to get paid (at least for a while) to sit and watch as your cohorts buy each other rounds of pretend-beer, with pretend money. And not like the pretend beer you used to get in Kansas years ago—real pretend beer that exists only as an icon on a Web page. I sometimes wonder if people really get that their bosses and potential employers or clients or family members are reading all of these.

Most of these updates come with little timestamps that can quickly reveal to the boss or your coworkers that you have spent an entire afternoon comparing favorite movies, or sending someone a bunny, or playing an online version of Scrabble. Last Christmas, I sent a Jewish friend of mine an icon of a baked ham. It all makes that much sense, to me.

What is accomplished by all of this?

I have an Instant Messenger client and I have several E-Mail accounts for keeping up with my family and friends, my coworkers and clients. To me, the value of a LinkedIn or Facebook account is in having but not abusing access to people who are, or were, somehow important to me, even if only briefly, even if years ago. I don't want that tube clogged with Which Puppy Is Cuter? or You Are Most Like Which Spice Girl? or a bunch of roll-playing knightly armor.

Brian Cooley, of CNET says it best, or at least most recently, for me. I'm full-up on phony drinks, cars and all of the rest.

I'm trying to learn JavaScript. I'm trying to keep up with PHP and MySQL. I'm wrestling with a new sick-leave request program and answering phones and e-mails and on and on and on. Pardon me, please, if I don't want to teach your virtual parrot a new word, today.

It's not personal.

In Praise of Ed

I used to write. For money, I mean. I spent about a dozen years toiling away on an Apple Macintosh, balancing telephone calls with FAX messages and e-mail and always, always meeting deadlines.

Kathie used to tell people "Mark has to come up with 750 words by Tuesday" but it was easier than that. I didn't have to actually invent 750 words. I could pick any words I cared to use. But from time to time I did build my own home-made word, if I thought that's what a piece needed.

I mention all of this to point out that I once made a pretty humble living by just thinking up the order I would string these already-invented words and shipping them off to the Big City. In every case, editors who sat in their comfy Park Avenue chairs (literally—the address of Ziff-Davis was One Park Avenue) received my efforts not as the Revealed Truth which I had so carefully sent them, but more as a guideline, an approximation, or even a first bid of the final work.

Very often, I would find my published piece lacked the, say, sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth paragraph of the twenty-paragraph whole. From time to time the opening paragraph would be rewritten, and as likely as not it then had little to do with the final paragraph, which I always found irritating in the way a tilted picture frame bugs me.

But in almost every case, far short of waterboarding, I would have quickly and loudly admitted that the published page was in fact better than the page I had actually shipped. This is one of the big differences between writing for publication in the classic sense and writing for publication online. There aren't as many other eyeballs involved, online.

You can find any number of books and manuals that tell you people online are in more of a hurry, that they don't like scrolling or clicking, that they want only the bullet points. I'm not sure how much I agree with any of that, but I do know most online writing goes straight from the author's fingertips to the Web, with no oversight. And I do know that is not always A Good Thing.

One of the best things you can do before you walk away from a page and proclaim it finished is have someone else look it over. If they find a mistake you missed, then so much the better. Subsequent readers will think you are just smart, careful or both. And if they don't find a problem, that just reinforces the talent and understanding you bring to bear in your writing.

I'm not big on rules of thumb when it comes to writing, online or otherwise. "Always rewrite a piece four times," "Never put more than a thousand words online" or "Always include an illustration" may be good for some situations. But not everything. I don't view the speed limit sign that says 65mph in quite the same way on a clear, dry summer afternoon as I do on a snowy, gray, frozen evening in winter. "Write until it's right" is good, though. I would hate to think Lincoln might have done another version of the Gettysburg Address, just because the one we know was only his third pass.

And how would you count rewrites, anyway? Some people are comfortable banging out a first draft with no revision at all. Then they go back and do all of the edits and spelling corrections and give it one final pass and they're done. Others (like me), will "start" a sentence, back up and "initiate" a sentence, back up again to "begin" a sentence and finally revert to "start" before they ever get to the end. If you never revisit that paragraph again, is it still a first draft, or are parts of it (at least) on the fourth?

I'm not sure, but I know I tend to get really comfortable with an idea in my head as I am committing it to the keyboard and very often I don't notice that I have not ever quite made the sale that I thought I have. Someone new, coming in for the first time, will notice that you never quite make your case, or the case you've made is weak, etc. That is why there are editors whenever anyone writes a book or a magazine article.

And that is why we should all probably have at least one other person look things over, before we click the button that turns our ideas into bits and digits and hot phosphor.

So, what do you do?

It's a pretty innocent question, probably used to start a thousand conversations or more every hour of the day.

But the world hasn't quite caught up to what I do, really. I picture a giant slide-rule with a bunch of job descriptions on one side and the number of people who understand it all on the other. Answer "Doctor" and most people will get it. Answer "Waitress" and most people will get it. But my job is still coming into common understanding, even as a few others "I'm a Cooper" are falling off.

I'm happy that we seem to be about at the end of the Goofy Job Title era, even as more and more internet companies are born with goofy names. Do you think Gordon Gekko, in some future sequel to Wall Street will be yelling at someone for spending more than $400 a share to buy Google, Yahoo! or Twitter? Several years ago, people at trade shows happily exchanged business cards with titles like "Vice President in charge of Tomorrow" or "Chaos Engineer" or even "Webmaster." What do you do, indeed?

At social gatherings, I usually introduce myself as a "Web Designer" because that term seems to have the most traction with civilians. But, honestly? I haven't designed a Web site in years. I think of someone who actually makes the decision, "The navigation will go here" and "the background colors will be this, this and that" as a Web Designer. You know, making decisions about the design. They aren't concerned too much with storing or retrieving data, assigning values to variables and other bit-twiddling adventures. It's more about the visual construction of the page. I don't really do that.

I have had some acceptance calling myself a "Web Developer" lately. People don't seem to understand that quite as well as Designer, but it does sound a little more thinky, and it is a little closer to what I actually do, on some days. To me, though, a Web Developer is someone who spends their days actively building Web applications. These are the folks who create Web machinery like Blackboard, eBay, or Amazon.com. They aren't so much consumed with the design of a page, as much as whether it correctly gathers names, addresses and other contact information. It doesn't really matter what color the page header is, or what font is used in photo captions, to Web Developers. I don't really do that, either.

For a while, it looked like maybe "Web Master" would come to the fore. I have struggled over the years to gain a level of expertise with several languages, HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP MySQL and now JavaScript. Along the way, I have earned some competence with the Dreamweaver and HomeSite page editors, Photoshop and Fireworks graphic editors, and quite a bit of what passes for operating system and Web server technology. And there are protocols for how we work with all of these tools. Standards compliance, and accessible design being the most prominent. Do you think after all of this I could be a Web Master? Most people seem to smell a little more server technology than I have in my own cologne, so Web Master seems to be receding into the middle distance, somewhere.

We are lucky to share a living language. There is no word for "JavaScript" in Latin. But the downside of that is that if enough people don't get the memo, the entire meaning of a word can change. A century ago, a man could say, "I am gay" and everyone knew he was happy. Today, everyone knows something entirely different. It can happen in only a few years. When Steven Levy wrote Hackers, it was a term of almost reverence. Today, a Hacker is someone with a high degree of evil within them.

Sometimes these changes are important. Sometimes, though, they don't really matter and our language seems to struggle with a concept that does not have a name of its own. Run your PC without antivirus software and you will probably quickly notice a degradation in performance. I don't think it matters much if you want to say you have caught a virus, worm, Trojan, root kit, adware or spyware. A computer technician may disagree. We have all heard the (false) story of how the Eskimo have three-dozen names for "snow." But is it important that my mother or sister know the difference, when you can tell them "I have a virus" and they will fix whatever the problem is? I'm not so sure.

So, "What do you do?"