Auntie Elsie had an open wood fire, a large garden with a jungle and a lion (that we never actually met), and cats who would scarper from anyone else; a kitchen that smelled comfortingly of gas and bacon, a downstairs loo that smelled of perfumed soap; quilts, books, old furniture, and a room full of teddy bears.

She also had a music box.

***

I’m very bad at keeping in touch with people. I have great intentions to, but something scares me off; and the longer I leave it the more I panic about it and do nothing. I’ll feel guilty at the drop of a hat, yet I seem to do everything in my power to exacerbate that.

I have a cousin with a severely handicapped son, who I keep intending to contact but don’t. Other members of the family have been going through rough patches and I’ve meant to get in touch, but haven’t. Auntie Elsie was herself ill for a while before she died and I desperately wanted to see her or contact her, but I didn’t.

***

A little while after the funeral, my name was drawn as the happy recipient of the old music box. I was delighted, genuinely excited: I was going to have it restored, and I was going to put the tunes on the internet for the family to hear. Instead I let it sit forlornly in my office for four years.

But now I intend to get off my backside and do something with it. It’s the least I owe the family, and in particular my Auntie Elsie.

It does need restoring: bits are broken, one lever has snapped off (although I was told by an expert just after I acquired it that it wasn’t beyond repair), and I’ve a horrible feeling that one of the bumpy bits was pinged across the room when I tried playing it just now. I’ve also no idea any more what each lever does, and flicking them didn’t seem to have much effect, so I’ve no idea of the order of the tunes.

Thankfully the long-yellowed track listing, still coated in ancient sticky tape (not so sticky now), continues to hang loosely from the inside of the lid: sadly I can’t understand a word of it. I think some of it’s in French, but it’s also in a beautiful calligraphic hand that I can’t decipher (yet).

But no matter. Here, for your delectation and wonder, is a tune from Auntie Elsie’s (as yet un-restored) music box:

Auntie Elsie’s Music Box track 1

• Possibly related posts

  1. Auntie Elsie’s music box: the tunes

This post will appear particularly self-indulgent: it’s trying to articulate something that I haven’t managed well out loud. It’s also one of those awkward situations where the post is really meant for a specific group of people but is on a public blog. And besides, I’ve only dared to write it because Nick told me to. So do feel free to leave at this point.

After my marriage broke up three and a half years ago I didn’t really have any friends in Birmingham that I could just drop in on (or maybe I did, but I tend to need explicit permission else I feel intrusive). They are all in couples and some have children. And most are mutual friends: I didn’t want to put them in the awkward position of being in the middle (and I felt awkward too) so I would just hide away from them. And in any case they are rarely free at weekends.

They would encourage me to try and meet people. I really wanted to but I didn’t know how, and would just wander around town drinking coffee, reading, watching people, and berating myself for never talking to anyone. I did that pretty much every weekend for three years, to the point that I hated weekends.

Then one evening a friend invited me to a pub to meet a few Birmingham bloggers. I had a blog that I updated about as often as my cat went outside (she hates going outside: I have to chuck her out the front so that she has to walk round to the back to be let in; it’s the only exercise she gets). I had also tried dabbling with Twitter, but I updated that even less frequently. So I went along; partly out of curiosity, but mainly in order to return the camera that my friend had accidentally left with me. I felt awkward, presumed I’d made a tit of myself, and eventually went home wishing I’d never gone and vowing never to go again.

The next morning, to my great surprise, I discovered that the people I thought I’d made a fool of myself in front of had started following me on Twitter. So I followed back.

Since then I’ve been involved (admittedly with varying levels of reliability on my part) with Birmingham bloggers, Birmingham Social Media Cafe, Eleven hours on the Eleven Bus, Twitpanto, Big City Talk, Digital Mentors, We Share Stuff, Rhubarb Radio, 4am Project, BARG, and any number of other activities that result from a criss-cross of each other. And more importantly I’ve found a lot of friends, including some that I hope will allow me to call them fairly close friends.

I won’t name people because it wouldn’t be fair, but I could easily list twenty who I see fairly regularly and would regard as friends; and seven or eight of those are particularly important to me. And bear in mind that I’m not usually good at thinking of people as ‘friends’. I tend to love people and want to befriend them, but presume they don’t feel the same; and I get very low if I think I’ve upset them or said something stupid (which happens pretty much all the time). So it takes me a long time to feel comfortable with people and to presume I’m worthy of being labeled their ‘friend’.

Except, with the speed of conversation – both inane and important – that happens on Twitter, friendships flourished much more quickly than I could have imagined.

But, like I said, it’s not just down to Twitter. It helped the process, and without it I would probably never have met these people; but the people had to be there in the first place. And lovely people have lovely friends, and so the networks grow.

And that’s the tangible part. Since meeting these people a mere eight months ago, my social life has transformed. In a good way, because I have lots of friends and people to go drinking with.

However it’s also very strange, because I still don’t understand what people see in me. (I’m not trying to be pittyingly self-effacing, this is leading up to something; bear with me.) I love interacting with these people, and I think every one of them is pretty remarkable.

But not me. I’m just me: bumbling, insecure and too scared of change to do anything at all (except escape my house as often as I can). So when someone made a website in tribute of me I didn’t really know how to deal with it. People affectionately (I believe) posted up stuff that I’d done or said.

It’s very sweet, but why me? Why not one of the others? I can think of plenty of people who are way more worthy. The thing is, do they see it? I don’t see what’s so special about me; in fact I’m convinced that nothing is. Apparently some people disagree with me; but would they recognise themselves as being special? Probably not.

So I want them to know that – for every one of them who has posted to that site – I would have had it the other way round.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Buying friends’ time: when should we do it?
  2. How the internet supports friendships
  3. Google Latitude

This morning I needed some advice on WordPress MU, and was able to think of a number of personal contacts that I could ask. However, I would have been asking on behalf of my employer and therefore would be taking advantage of people’s goodwill by expecting free advice from people who would usually charge for it. So I emailed some of my new friends for their professional rates.

This has created a couple of dilemmas.

Firstly, there’s the question of loyalties. If each of my friends have the same skills, how do I decide which to give my money to? I guess I just have to be professional and choose against which will be best value for money for my employer. It feels a bit uncomfortable though.

Secondly, and much less easy to answer, is the question of boundaries: when are my friends my friends and when are they my consultants?

I believe that – for most office jobs – the boundaries between professional and personal lives are blurring to the point of being indistinguishable. Thanks to social media, and technology in general, we can now be available at any time for both friends and colleagues. This means that employers who refuse to accept that are missing out by not being where their market is at any point; and are probably therefore unwittingly discouraging their employees from being loyal to their jobs outside ‘office hours’.

I, and my employer, have benefited hugely from the use of social media by myself and colleagues. Those inane little messages – that take practically no time to send and respond to – help to create personal relationships which can be unimaginably valuable for support on a professional level.

But, as I’ve said, these sometimes need formalising as professional relationships. The paradox is that, by formally identifying professional connections with friends, do I thereby force them into being consultants during my work time and friends outside of it: and in turn reinforce the work-life divide and the 9-5 ethic that I believe are vanishing?

• Possibly related posts

  1. Since using Twitter…
  2. How the internet supports friendships
  3. Google Latitude

So here, sort of in response to Ellie’s list, are 18 to add to my previous seven. I am not doing any more though, so if someone comes along with an even higher number they can bog off.

1. Unlike Ellie, I’ve never cracked my head open; but when I was very young I had a number of operations to try and correct a club foot. They worked pretty well, but I have very little movement in my left ankle and I can’t balance on my left leg. Apparently surgery has moved on a lot since the early ’70s.
2. I’m 36. (People keep asking, so it clearly has a place in this list.)
3. I’m a Virgo and I think it says a lot about me. Except it can’t because I don’t believe in horoscopes. Or rather, not the generic nonsense you get in newspapers. I did once reluctantly let someone do my horoscope properly, looking up birth times in a book and everything. It was frighteningly, uncannily accurate: she told me things about my personality that I’d been trying desperately to keep hidden. I refuse to believe in them though, because it would mean accepting that we have no control over our destiny and that our creativity is merely illusion.
4. I’m a perfectionist but not a completer-finisher. In other words I will leave things half-started because I’m terrified of them not being perfect. So I end up creating half-baked rubbish. Oh the irony.
5. I had a pet rabbit when I was a child. It was vicious: we had to wear gloves to feed it. I don’t think it was happy. When we got him he had to travel a few miles to our house, so I named him Gulliver.
6. I’m always falling in love (whatever that means). I never let on though, and seem to have a built-in panic mechanism that means I run away if anyone shows interest. Maybe because friendship is very important and I worry about ruining that.
7. I learned to type at school, on a big, commercial, manual typewriter. Tipp-ex paper was the cool product, and much easier to use than an eraser. But if I was carbon-copying I would usually forget to erase mistakes from the copies, and end up making a bigger mess – by typing over the mistake – than I had to start with. Now I have a ‘delete’ key and seemingly unlimited ‘undo’ and ‘redo’. Magic.
8. I played percussion badly in a South London concert band a few years ago. For two London Marathons I crashed my cymbal through countless Souza numbers, at the side of the road.
9. I, too, like buying books but rarely read them. I’m good at starting them but bad at finishing them. I read Crime and Punishment until a few pages before the end, then never picked it up again. I’ve since seen it on telly so I know the ending now.
10. I too was a member of the Young Ornithologists’ Club: yay! I still don’t know anything about birds though. But I do remember a trip to Regents Park and seeing Canada Geese for the first time. Now they’re bloody everywhere.
11. I’m very indecisive. But I suspect you know that already.
12. I love people but I’m terrified of them. My default presumption is that they think I’m an idiot, and it takes an awfully long time to persuade me otherwise. Which is possibly partly why I sometimes come across as arrogant (I don’t mean to), because I presume people have already decided they don’t like me and so I have nothing to lose. I’m going to regret writing this I think.
13. I was brought up as a Quaker. I’m lapsed now (if it’s even possible for a Quaker to lapse).
14. I’m married, technically. We’ve been separated for over three years and just haven’t got round to ending it officially. It took a surprisingly long time to come to terms with.
15. Social media terrifies me. Yet I evangelise it, and here I am telling personal things to anyone who’ll listen. I really am an idiot.
16. I’ve worked for my current employer for 13 years.
17. I love rice cakes. I’ll eat them dry if I have to.
18. I didn’t go to university. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life (I still have no idea, and it keeps me awake at night). Going to university for the sake of it (which is what a lot of people appeared to do) seemed pointless and a waste of time and money, and I knew full well that I wouldn’t do any work even if I did go. A couple of years ago I came very close to applying for an MA course in graphic communication, but I chickened out.

End of meme. Don’t even think of asking me to write more.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Seven things you may not know about me
  2. Since using Twitter…

Pete Ashton recently wrote about how we should put more of ourselves into our online activity, as that is what gives it meaning. I agree, although I’m not sure it’s any different from offline activity. And it depends on why you’re active in that realm in the first place.

If your intention is to grow a network of friends or professional contacts then yes, the more you can engage in an honest and personal way the better. However I personally have no problem with people just broadcasting if that’s what they feel comfortable with, or if they’re simply having fun doing it.

However I do tend to agree with Pete’s idea that people bond around ‘pointless, transient, silly and fun things’. I think this is because they are actually safe and easy ways to form connections with other people (something we tend to crave). This is certainly what I’ve been getting out of blogging and Twitter. And as a result, as Pete suggests, this has led to more serious discussions and collaborations (such as the recent re-writing of Birmingham’s Big City Plan).

Use of the internet does not in itself create frinedships. I suspect that those friendships formed purely through Twitter will be much less durable than those that have also developed offline, especially now that Twitter is getting so big and people are spreading themselves much more thinly.  What the internet does offer is a way of discovering and cementing friendships much more quickly than ever before. But the way we engage in those friendships is really no different.

I was recently encouraged to participate in a sort of  ‘chain letter’. I had to write seven things about myself that other people may not know, then pass the task on to seven others. I don’t usually like this sort of thing because it makes me feel obliged to do something I’m not entirely comfortable with else feel guilty for letting someone down; and angry with that person for obliging me to do it in the first place.

But this one was passed to me just after I’d read Pete’s post, and around the time that Jon Hickman had set up @cluedo on Twitter (which encouraged people to discover someone’s identity by asking questions of them). So the ‘chain letter’ seemed an ideal way of further developing new friendships: I was genuinely keen to discover more about the people I was getting to know, in their words, and to share (just a little bit) more of myself.

As a result I know that Nicky didn’t start talking until she was three years-old, Jon doesn’t like vegetables, Midge regrets not taking his physics degree seriously and Bruce is actually quite shy. Not greatly illuminating in themselves, but they all help to create richer connections between these people.

We don’t use the internet because we’re friendless, unintersting geeks who sit at home blogging and twittering because we have no life: we use it precisely in order to support and enrich our thoroughly active offline lives.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Should we worry about delivering online content to offline users?
  2. Since using Twitter…
  3. Social media: peripheral impact measurement

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of the time we evangelists are, ourselves, fairly new to all of this and so are unaware of all the potential implications.

For a start, it never dawned on me that by using Twitter I could find my comments, accompanied by my name and profile information, feeding into a BBC news page; or that by moderating comments on my blog I become legally responsible for their content.

A friend on Twitter today asked if someone could write an article explaining social reporting, and in reply was pointed to a post by Paul Henderson which said:

“social reporters get the offline stuff online, then you can link to it, comment on it, aggregate it, remix it”.

I think that’s a good, brief definition. In the context of this post I would add that if we are encouraging social reporting then we should also be helping people to understand how their published content may be used, and that while that may be exciting it is also mostly out of their control.

A couple of weeks ago Stuart Parker persuaded Jon Hickman and myself to have a conversation on film around the question ‘What is a digital mentor?‘. As a result I suggested to a few friends that maybe (and crudely speaking) a ‘social media consultant’ helps people to use and get the most out of the tools, and a ‘digital mentor’ has a more pastoral role. From their replies I got the impression I may be in a minority regarding this distinction, but one respondent confirmed that I wasn’t alone in my general concerns:

“I’d consider myself very web-literate, but recently I got a potentially libelous comment on one of my blogs that really stumped me. I wrestled with what to do about it for literally days. I am in the lucky position of knowing a couple of excellent web journos … who I felt able to ask for advice.

“In a way, the tech stuff is easier to deal with than the general/etiquette/legal/fuckwittery etc. stuff. We not only need to give people the tools but also the confidence.”

I want to do something practical, but I’m not sure what. Any thoughts welcome!

• Possibly related posts

  1. Digital mentors?
  2. Blogging for the sake of it may be no bad thing
  3. Should we tackle the digital divide or live with it?

But what about as a therapeutic activity? Or, rather, as a creative outlet for those of us who may sometimes be uncomfortable in traditional social situations?

I’m not going to begin to try to understand mental health: I’m not a doctor and, as far as I know, I have no mental health issues; and besides it would be presumptuous to suggest that I may have even the merest inkling of how other people understand the world and interact with it. But I wonder if there are benefits of social media for people’s wellbeing, and if so how we harness them and capitalise on them.

I often feel paralyzed by indecision, wanting an outlet for something but not knowing what it is or how to vent it, and terrified of doing the wrong thing or of letting people down. This can lead to an inability to do anything: to change jobs, to tidy the house, to keep in touch with friends; and, somewhat ironically, to say the right thing or avoid letting people down.

Blogging has recently become an outlet, a channel for diverting that sense of helplessness and inertia. Of course I could easily write things down on paper, or try other creative pursuits, but there’s no motivation to; blogging, on the other hand, can be social and interactive while not requiring physical interaction, and therefore can be much more motivating.

But it can also be very dangerous.

I’m forever having conversations in my head with people about things that worry me, though very rarely do I feel able to have them for real. But I do find it very easy to click ‘publish’. That’s incredibly dangerous if you’re feeling vulnerable and are telling the world things they may not want to hear, or that you may regret saying (as I may be in danger of doing here!).

Why am I saying all this?

One of my fears of trying to bridge the ‘digital divide’ (ie between the technologically literate and the disenfranchised) is that of encouraging people into an area way out of their comfort zone and dumping them there, because we hadn’t fully appreciated the subtle but profound adjustments they would need to make and so were not equipped to support them. Therefore addressing the digital divide must be done with great care and sensitivity.

But could it also be an ideal opportunity to help people find ways of channeling their creativity; their worries, angers, sadnesses, excitements, energies, frustrations, joys, exhilerations?

If I can find social media tools (such as blogs and Twitter) to be a dangerously easy way of exposing my vulnerability but simultaneously a rewarding creative outlet, could there be a benefit in the collaboration between different specialisms: ie one that understands developing technologies and one that understands people? For example (at the risk of sounding crass) a collaboration between specialists in social media and in mental health?

I don’t mean that people should be encouraged to pour their hearts out on the internet. I do mean that maybe social media tools could be harnessed as a creative channel for those energies that might otherwise manifest themselves in negative ways.

And maybe collaborations (such as that suggested above) could inform other work which encourages people to explore social media and the internet.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Digital mentors as pastoral carers?
  2. Should we tackle the digital divide or live with it?
  3. Digital mentors?