Caveat Pedestris

Disclaimer: This post contains extremely strong language. In consideration of my readers with delicate sensibilities, I have asterisked out most of the letters in all cuss words involving sexual acts or organs. Hopefully enough consonants remain to give you at least a flavor of the conversation described below.  

I’m a fairly timid person when it comes to physical danger. You’ll never catch me bouncing  around at the end of a bungee cord, or leaping out of an airplane with a few square yards of thin silk between me and certain death, or scaling a sheer rock face with a couple of crampons and a bag of chalk. I go to great lengths to keep my exercise safe and sedate. Never run when you can walk, that’s my motto. Or at least it was until yesterday. Now I know that even walking can be a life-threatening activity.

Ambling along the main road into town yesterday, I came to a small side street just as a cherry red half ton truck approached the intersection on my left. It was a two way stop. Expecting the truck to at least slow down at the corner, I stepped confidently off the curb, then leapt quickly back up to the safety of the sidewalk when it became apparent the driver had either not seen the stop sign or had decided the instruction on it did not apply to him.

The truck sped out of the side street and crossed three (miraculously empty) traffic lanes on the main road before veering sharply to avoid colliding with a low-slung black sports car traveling in the fourth lane. Both drivers slammed on their brakes and powered down their windows.

“F***k**g freak!” yelled the old man in the truck, his face as red the paint on vehicle.

“What the f**k is wrong with you, man?” shouted the young man in the sports car.

Clearly unsatisfied with this response to his opening remark, and perhaps believing he was protected by the size of his truck and his advanced age, the old man upped the expletive ante. “Get off your g**d**n phone when you’re f***k**g driving, you f***k**g c**t!!”

The young man opened the door of his sports car and unfolded approximately six-and-a-half feet of Rambo-style muscle, formidably displayed in spandex bicycle shorts and a cutoff T-shirt, from the driver’s seat. Still clutching his cell phone, his jaw pushed forward with belligerence, he strode toward the truck bellowing, “You senile old fart! You could have killed me!”

My sentiments exactly, I thought.

Color faded from the old man’s face. Apparently deciding that neither his truck nor the birth date on his driver’s license constituted adequate protection from an angry giant, he stomped down on the gas pedal and peeled off down the main road. Still watching the young man in his side mirror, he ran a red light at the next intersection, causing a massive cacophony of horns and squealing brakes, but (miraculously) no actual collisions.

As he walked back to his sports car, the young man pressed his phone to his ear and began excitedly describing his near-death experience to the person on the other end of the line. Still talking, he folded himself back into his car. Steering with one hand while he continued to talk into his phone, he swerved across the three (miraculously still empty) traffic lanes and entered the side street I was once again attempting to cross.

I leapt back up onto the curb as the sports car whooshed by, missing me with inches to spare, then waited until there were absolutely no cars anywhere in sight before scurrying across the street.

I Want To Be Like The Dalai Lama

I have been avoiding Twitter. As a writer, I feel anything worth saying needs more than 140 characters to be said properly; attested by the length of this sentence which, with the addition of this final clause, is 204 characters long. As a reader, I find other people’s attempts to squeeze meaning into such a severely compressed medium utterly confusing. Then last week, while conversing with two friends who recently took a social networking course, I realized my Twitterphobia has led me to the brink of what could be an irreversible mistake.

When I started programming back in the dark ages, computers were so simplistic that universities did not bother to offer degrees in the subject. Most of my early co-workers picked up rudimentary programming skills while obtaining a degree in physics, or mathematics, or in one case, while taking a first in Classics at Cambridge. They then proceeded to learn whatever else was needed while on the job. Nowadays, it is impossible to get a position as an Application Engineer without a degree in Computing, and that’s a good thing, because the technology is well on its way to joining particle physics and neurosurgery in the category of subjects so complex they require the equivalent of a PhD just to wrap one’s head around the terminology.

As I listened to my friends expound enthusiastically on the topic of Twitter, I realized social networking is rapidly approaching a similar complexity barrier that will make acquisition of its fundamental concepts impossible for the untutored. Concerned that if I waited much longer to acquire the basics, I’d be so far behind the curve I’d need to acquire a bachelor’s degree in social media just to tweet (and such a degree already exists at one online university), I reactivated my four year old Twitter account, with the intention of developing my remedial social networking skills in the same way I learned to program computers: by copying the techniques of the pioneers who had gone before.

The first step in any learning process is to define one’s motivation. When I learned to program, it was because I’d watched the programmers where I worked hanging around yakking in each other’s cubicles while drinking coffee, and I thought, That’s the job for me! - a misunderstanding that was only corrected when it was too late to back out. Similarly, it wasn’t until, halfway through the initial draft, I realized my first novel was complete crap and decided to study writing. So, why would I want to social network?

First, I considered the social aspect. Merriam Webster defines social as: marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with friends or associates. I only have two friends/associates on Twitter right now, and if I want to talk to either of them I can just walk down the street. Even if more of my friends join in future, I know their phone numbers and email addresses, and quite frankly, I find those mediums much more pleasant than learning to decipher cryptic messages full of hash tags and at signs.

That left me with the networking aspect. Merriam Webster defines networking as: the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions; specifically: the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business. Now this made more sense. As a novelist, which is a very solitary occupation, I could easily see the benefit of cultivating productive relationships to exchange information.

I signed up to follow my publisher, an industry publication called Publisher’s Weekly, and few writers and industry pundits I admire. Immediately my Twitter screen filled up with obscurities such as:

RT @IGN Arrested Development: Season 4 began filming today and @BatemanJason provides the first photo from production! http://go.ign.com/N0BJ9D

"Broken Harbor got started because my husband & I had mice." #TanaFrench talks inspiration & thriller #writing: http://bit.ly/NohSMp.

.@bestbuy do u sell falcons or any other birds of prey?

I'm getting a pack of #MOO cards because I've got Klout - thanks to @overheardatmoo! You can too, just click here: [redacted in the interests of preserving your eyeballs]

WAKE is only $4.50 for 3 hours on Amazon! Hurry! RT like the wind!! http://www.amazon.com/

And the only tweet I initially understood:

I feel about a million times better than I did yesterday. Word to the wise: Don't accidentally eat bad clams the night before starting a tour

Believing I’d misunderstood the concept of “productive relationships”, I began clicking on all the blue stuff to find out what was going on. It soon became apparent that my definition of “productive” was correct, but my definition of “relationships” was too broad. All but one of the links I followed quickly devolved into an attempt to sell me something. While the relationships were clearly productive for the tweeter, productivity for the tweetee seemed conspicuously absent.  The one exception was the advice on clam consumption, which I fully intend to follow should I ever go on tour.

After scrolling through fifteen screens filled with similarly thinly disguised marketing ploys interspersed with the occasional informational tweet like the one about the intestinal side effects of bad shellfish, it became apparent that unless I was willing to invest endless hours in building a following and devising ancillary content to trick my followers into buying my books, social networking, at least on Twitter, was not worth the learning curve for me. Then I thought about His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a dude so cool and spiritually enlightened he would never dabble in something as commercial as online marketing.

HHDL, as he affectionately refers to himself in the third person, is on Twitter. He tweets once every two or three days, for a lifetime total of 812 vaguely inspiring messages about things like the importance of affection, the futility of violence and the posting of his latest webcast. He has 4,849,913 followers to date (which seems a bit paltry, given the number of practicing Buddhists in Thailand alone) and follows no one himself, making his Twitter presence more like a platform building exercise than any serious attempt to develop relationships.

Compare HHDL’s stats to those of the highly commercialized Yoko Ono at the opposite end of the Twitter spectrum. She tweets three to fifteen times a day, giving her a much higher tweet count than HHDL, although to be fair, most of her tweets are retweets or picture postings and have a mechanical quality that suggests some form of automation, which doesn’t indicate any actual intent to develop relationships either. At the time of this writing, Yoko has 2,772,660 followers and follows 871,440(!) people herself—including Bob Smith, “just a random guy from a random town”, who joined Twitter 18 hours before I began researching Yoko to promote an app called Rage Of Bahamut.

Here are my conclusions about social networking so far:

1.    The name is misleading.

2.    It is a lousy informational tool for me because I haven’t the patience scroll through pages of cryptic marketing tweets for the occasional gem of advice.

3.    It is a lousy marketing tool for me because I haven’t the patience to follow thousands of people in the hopes they will follow me back, then develop ancillary material to convince them to buy one of my books. 

To my mind the only tweeter worth emulating is the Dalai Lama. One obscure tweet every two or three days? No problem. I can handle that. Now all I need is a topic to pontificate on.

What was that you said? Motivation? Oh yeah. That too.