The Internet

Community ties.

Update #2 12/29: For those of you who’ve asked how you can get involved in bridging the digital divide (or simply learn more) in this beloved city of ours, please read the DC Office of the Chief Technology’s Digital Divide Strategy in which they lay out how they’re going to address these issues over the next few years. Also, you can email me at nmcairns at gmail dot com as I’m putting together a group of interested folks who want to work on this issue together.

Update 12/29: I’m really grateful for the response this post has gotten – positive and negative, supporting and dissenting opinions. I sincerely apologize if I offended any particular people. Unfortunately, blogging isn’t fair and you’re often forced to make blanket statements. For that, I am truly sorry. I don’t believe everyone nominated is simply “just a loud voice”. In fact, many of the people on the list are doing truly tremendous things.

Those were my points/intentions and I’m sorry if I missed a few transitional paragraphs here or there. Thank you for reading and please comment if you have any thoughts on this subject – positive or negative.

I was originally going to hold off on completing this post after some consideration last night, but after reading The Advoc8te’s blog post this morning about #DCTweeps I’m grateful I’m not the only one who feels as though the Washington Post’s contest (and the Fast Company Most Influential competition months ago… and every other social media competition) is missing the point.

I got into social media to change things. I got into web development to change things. I want to improve the lives of those around me and I think I can do that with the skills and connections that I’ve obtained in my time working tech-based jobs. I just need the ideas in my head and good people around me to actively make change happen. I don’t need awards or recognition to feel fulfilled.

This isn’t the case for everyone. Not everyone needs or wants to change the world, or even their community. And not everyone who uses Twitter needs to be changing things for the better; Twitter wasn’t built for that reason, nor should it ever completely become about advocacy. This doesn’t make me better than anyone, it just makes my role and goals for this community different.

However, we’re the leaders in this online community whether we choose to be or not. We make a living, feed ourselves and/or our families, and have an offline social network because we’re the best. People listen to what we have to say and are invested in our opinions and our lives. We’re not living up to our responsibilities as leaders through innovation, change, or betterment of our community and our neighbors; instead, we’re participating in meaningless competitions to garner an award from a print publication that does a poor job at covering/reporting the news on social media. Furthermore, we’re squandering the power we do have when we succumb to competitions like this.

I’m fully aware that people think I’m bitter because I wasn’t nominated. In fact, that’s not true at all. I easily could’ve asked one of 15-20 people who would’ve been more than willing to nominate me for something. I simply don’t need it. At the end of the day, awards like #DCTweeps don’t add any value to me or my role in this community. People listen to (or don’t listen to) what I have to say because they want to, not because I convinced a ton of people to vote for me so that I could win an award. That is what makes me a valued member of this community.

I’ve been thinking a lot about community and what it means to me, so I thought I’d share that. To me…

Community is about doing something – and doing it well – with no other intention than to better the world around us.

• We all have a lot of followers (apparently followers that will vote for us!) with a wide reach. I can send out a tweet about something DC-centric and get responses from people in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin… you name it. But what are we tweeting about? What messages are we spreading? That we organize events. That we hang out together. That we gossip and have formed clicks (bloggers, drama kids, outsiders, the pretty people) just like high school. We do all of that really well – maybe too well.

Community isn’t a place where we strive for individual recognition for personal gain.

• It’s cliche, but a community is only as good as the sum of its parts. As individuals, we can only achieve so much and if we continue to separate ourselves from the rest of the community that only leads to detrimental results. If we started working together, and then take our talents offline, the change we could achieve would be tremendous.

Community is a place where criticism and questions are valued.

• What good is a community if we’re not constantly exchanging ideas? Sometimes that can lead to difficult questions and different ideas, but that’s not a bad thing. As a community (and an individual), we learn the most when we’re tested and are forced to look within to find the answers. We shouldn’t ostracize others if they don’t agree with us on a few issues.

Community isn’t about putting ourselves above our friends and neighbors who are left behind.

• Case in point: DC broadband access. While we’re sitting here making a living off the internet, social media marketing, or whatever buzzword philosophy term you coined last month, there are parts of this city that have basically no internet access. The entire city has a broadband adoption rate of just 57% while Wards 1, 2, and 3 have adoption rates of nearly 100%. We’ve put a lot into who we are on the internet and the internet has paid us back. Shouldn’t we now try to pay it forward and advance our city?

We’re at the point where the loudest voice in the room gets heard and that’s not always good. People value number of followers over quality interactions. People value how cool a new tool is over what you can use that tool to effectively change your community or better this thing (the Internet) that has given you a career and put food on the table for your family.

We’ve allowed our leadership to morph into a constant online popularity contest where we vote for coolest nerd or floppiest butterfly instead of recognizing those who have actively sought to change the way our communities function. We’ve lost touch of what we’re supposed to be doing as leaders and I really hope we can find our way soon enough.

The six people you meet online.

Someone recently Tweeted: “Facebook is where you lie to your friends and Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.” I think that’s completely accurate. I’m not sure what it is about Twitter that encourages me and others to share as much as we do to complete strangers, but we’re all in this community now. There are groups of people who talk to each other all day long. Some of them I know I’ll meet in person one day and others I likely won’t ever know their real name because they use a pseudonym online. Either way, Twitter’s allowed us to develop “friendships” with people online that we would ordinarily have no relationship with.

Over the past few months and even years, I’ve met a considerable number of people from the Internet (don’t worry Mom, I’m always safe!). This ranges from the people I met on the_gw_files LiveJournal community, people I met through Facebook when we realized we had classes together, and, now, people I’ve met through Twitter. Some of these people have gone on to become my closest friends and I even wound up dating one of them for three years.

That said, no matter which way I’ve met people, there always seems to be the same kind of people:

The creepers. There are a LOT of guys who will follow you on the internet if you’re a moderately attractive girl with a snarky 140 character profile. Then, they’ll even try to connect with you on a personal level by STALKING YOU, sending you DMs instead of public responses, finding your email through stalkerish methods, and using an abundance of winky faces. These guys don’t allow the natural order of things to occur and, instead, ask you to hang out well before that point in the relationship has been reached.

The SWF. Yes, I’m talking about the movie. No, I have not personally had a situation in which my roommate cuts her hair to look like me and kills my puppy, but there are definitely situations in which people really want to be your friend. That’s great and all, but SLOW IT DOWN. You’re not going to be super close with every person you meet and sometimes people have real life commitments that make it hard to include new friends into the fold. That doesn’t mean the desire to meet more people and forge close relationships with them isn’t there, but that sometimes… people have lives outside of Twitter. [shocking, right?]

The people with no social skills. I think this is the category I fall into the most. I think we all flock to social media and the internet because that’s where we feel most comfortable, it’s where we think our voices are most appreciated and understood by others with similar interests. You don’t have to go to a bar and ask people a lot of questions to find out if you have the same interests — everyone just puts that information out there for you to see before you even get to know them. Then, we talk to people for however long it takes before we no longer feel awkward and decide to meet. Sometimes it’s awkward in person, sometimes it’s not.

The celebrities. Internet celebrities fascinate me because they’re generally ordinary people who write things about their every day lives for thousands of people to see it. Or, there are simply people that I’ve happened to follow for a long time and know a lot about their lives.

I don’t get star struck about actual famous people (I’ve met a lot of them and they’re usually underwhelming). However, put me in a room with “internet famous” people and I can become a total nut job (takes me out of the “no social skills” category and lumps me in with the “creepers”):

Me: OMG I KNEW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU BEFORE WE EVEN MET.
Them: *unfollows @nicoleindc on Twitter*

The people you should know. Sometimes there are people you simply just haven’t run into in life, but you need to. These people have a lot of the same interests as you and you may occasionally joke that you’re the same person. Sometimes, life is cruel and doesn’t allow you to meet. Then, nerds develop micro-blogging and that changes everything.

The soulmates. A very, very select few people fall into this category. These are the people that you bond with over joking about running through sprinklers on a hot day or meet you after work one day for 15 minutes just to keep your mind off things. Then, you realize you share the same love of 7-11 nachos and it’s a done deal. In all seriousness, these are the people that you’re lucky to meet no matter how you meet them; social media just so happens to be the way in which you’re introduced.

I’m sure there are a billion other ‘types’ of social media people, but these are my favorite. They’re the ones that make things interesting, in good and bad ways. Sometimes, the bad ones make you want to quit it all and the good ones make you grateful to be a nerd.

Where do we go from here?

My story isn’t unique.

When I got laid off from the music industry in early 2009, I built myself a social media campaign with Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging presences to get a job. I was one of the lucky ones that was able to do so in just two months, but so many people are still looking for jobs in this industry. At the time, these stories were unheard of, but now they’re a dime a dozen (I’ve since found two different jobs through social media).

Everyone and their brother is trying to be a social media expert, ninja, guru, evangelist, cat wrangler or whatever the buzzword is that week. The first thing they do to achieve that goal: build an online persona. Anyone can attend a webinar and read a few things on Wikipedia to get themselves started. That isn’t the tough part, though; the hard part is figuring out what to do with it if and when you have a devoted community of individuals helping you achieve your goals, promoting your messages, and interacting with you both offline and online.

Over the past two years, I’ve built myself my own online community of 999 individuals (okay, there are probably some spammers, too) that listen to what I have to say. I’ve met close to 200 of them and formed close and/or meaningful relationships with 15 or so that have gone far beyond the online spectrum.nNow that we know each other and realize we have shared interests beyond 140 characters, people, including myself, have a hard time not blurring the lines between personal and professional for one simple reason: we are human. The brand manager for Coca-Cola knows exactly what the boundaries are for what can and can’t be said on the company’s Twitter or Facebook account; we don’t have that external force providing a filter over our Tweets.

I’ve had similar conversations with people about this very subject over the past few weeks. These conversations have been pretty much the same: where do we go from here? How has it evolved so fast? What do I do with this now? What if the internet blew up tomorrow?

I often think about the following questions:

• How human is too human for your personal brand?
• How do you keep your personal brand human, true, and real without exposing parts of yourself you don’t want others to know?
• How do you keep people interested in your personal brand when you’re not actually “selling” anything?
• When does social media stop adding value to your personal brand?

The funny thing is, as we build these personal brands for ourselves, we become locked into handles, themes, and users we connect with on a daily basis. We strive to become more and more like a brand when brands are striving to become more and more human.

After all these conversations, I feel I’m at the point where I’m not really sure what to do with any of this. Do I shut down my Twitter account and cut my losses and forge strong, lasting connections with the people I’ve met so far? Do I keep going and tweet whatever the hell I want to tweet and continue to build this “brand”? I’m not sure.

I guess I’m going through a sort of “social media identity crisis.”

Note: I originally wrote this as a potential topic of discussion at BrandsConf in December. It was rejected, but I still like the idea of this discussion.

Just words?

It’s 4:45PM on a Friday afternoon. It’s the first day of October, and the first real day it’s felt like fall. I’m partaking in all my favorite fall things like wearing a lightweight coat, sweater, and boots, and drinking a pumpkin spice latte. I’ve been enjoying a quiet, yet busy day at the office listening to the leaves on the tree in front of my window rustle as the wind blows. Yet, all I can do is think about my plans for the night: seeing The Social Network.

I’m not seeing the movie because I’m a social media nerd, but because I love a good character-driven plot and I firmly believe that that’s what this movie will be. I’m seeing the movie with a dozen or so of my “close” Twitter friends whom I’ve gradually gotten to know over the past months through social media and, eventually, in-person networking events. I’m sure there’ll be some people disappointed that the movie won’t focus on the culture around Facebook and how it’s changed our society. However, I believe we’ll get a perceptive look at the man behind the social network and his motivations for its development.

Mark Zuckerberg has forever changed our generation. Moreover, his invention has forever changed our language and the ways in which we communicate. No longer is our generation’s lack of attention span be blamed on quick edits in music videos on MTV; it’s increasingly blamed on our consumption of social media. This probably isn’t an inaccurate assumption. I’m guessing that wasn’t Zuckerberg’s intention, but it happened.

Now, we’re consuming information in shorter and shorter segments, with fewer and fewer words. A status update here, a relationship update here. If you don’t document it on Facebook, did it ever really happen?

On Twitter, words don’t even matter – it’s all about characters, 140 or less. Crimes of inaccurate spellings and improper grammar usage are committed by even the most intelligent and savvy tweeters out there, and it’s perfectly acceptable.

Without Facebook and, eventually, Twitter, who knows where our language would be. Would we continue to shorten and hone our messages into characters instead of points or messages?

So that leads me to ask my next question, are words just words? Have they lost their value in our culture? Have they lost their ability to move people and cause them to take action? I don’t think so.

This morning, I was reading a review of The Social Network in a newspaper (yes, they still exist). The article quickly made me realize and remember that people still know how to use their words, and use them well. The reviewer drew analogies comparing Zuckerberg’s rise to fame to that of fictional character Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. In three sentences (39 words or 215 characters), the author is able to sum up both movies accurately and eloquently:

So, both men get wildly famous and wildly rich by being driven by different desires. One wants to create, one wants to have. But do their reasons really matter when they leave a trail of wounded friends behind them?

I’m not sure how, or why, those words moved me so. Maybe because I once wanted to be an arts critic or I value the ability to write sentences without overuse of conjunctions (because it’s a skill I’ve yet to master). But, maybe it’s because I still value long-form writing. Maybe despite my obsession with social media communications, I still have a soft spot in my heart for a well-written piece of journalism.

As the author finished her review about the movie, she said the “real story, of course, is yet to be written.” This can be said for not only Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and social media, but also for the value of the written word.

I, for one, will start challenging myself not to see words in terms of character counts or interesting status updates, but important tools to ensure my future as an intelligent human being. Why? Because words are not just words. They’re what hold us together as a culture and allow us to communicate with one another. Let’s beging valuing them again.

New favorites in an old city.

When I moved back to D.C. from Brooklyn, I was worried I’d quickly be bored by the slower pace of life and lack of things to do. Instead, I feel like D.C. is a lot like Brooklyn/New York in that I’m constantly discovering things – good and bad. As you know, I have a love/hate relationship with D.C. and we’re currently on bad terms. Why? I’m not sure actually; we’re just kind of in a funk. We both need the other to make some changes, but neither one of us are budging at the moment.

Two weekends ago, however, two new friends of mine (@alexpriest and @ptklein) set out for an afternoon of “working” in a coffee shop, followed by dinner and drinks. The first thing Alex did: send out a tweet to his 3,000 followers on Twitter asking for recommendations for coffee shops in the Friendship Heights neighborhood. Within a few minutes, suggestions from his followers came pouring in, including one from a local food blogger we both follow:

That was it. The plan was set. We were going to meet up at the @TynanCoffeeTea the next day at 2pm.

We met up on Saturday, and, after a few hours in the coffee shop, we quickly grew hungry and remembered there was a pizza shop that just opened about a mile away that recently followed both of us on Twitter. My friend DMed (direct messaged) @petes_newhaven and asked if there was a discount for Twitter followers. Even though there wasn’t an actual deal for the Twitter followers, the administrator of the account quickly replied and offered us a free round of beer with our pizza (The Edge of the Woods: eggplant, ricotta, caramelized onions, and spinach) and we needed no further convincing.

Being the social media nerds that we are, we all instantly checked in on Foursquare after being greeted by the incredibly friendly staff. We told the manager about the Twitter special we were offered and they happily obliged.

When our pizza came, we took pictures and then took a bite. We were all hooked. Impressed with the quality of ingredients and excellent flavors, we all instantly tweeted pictures and reviews of our experience.

With each new bite, we became bigger and bigger fans. Although we only tried the Edge of the Woods pizza, everything that passed by looked incredibly delicious, even the spaghetti (I hate spaghetti). We were all also impressed with their social media efforts to get us all into the store. Once we were there, the amazing customer service and outstanding product made us fall in love even more.

For the social media/small business angle of this story, check out my original post on the Carousel30 Interactive blog.

Exposing yourself.

If you know anything about me, you know that my entire life is online, and I have very strong opinions about the types of content people put online about themselves.

That’s why, when my friend Melanie decided to start a guest blogging series about body image issues on her website, I was shocked when I was one of the first few to pipe up and offer a post. I was even more shocked when, a few weeks later, I decided to write another post.

I come from a very sarcastic family and, being a cynical person, I generally joke around a lot. I started joking about my body image issues at a young age and have poorly masked my insecurities for a long time. When Melanie asked me to write a post about my breast reduction in December 2007, I didn’t think I’d have such a hard time writing it. I also didn’t realize how much time and energy went into making the decision to have elective surgery (even though I don’t feel it was elective).

Then, after reading the body image posts each and every day, I realized I still had a lot to say about my body. I decided to write another post, not about my issues with my body, but how I express my internal emotions externally on my body through my tattoos.

Although I didn’t really struggle with putting the personal content online, I absolutely did struggle with putting pictures of my tattoos online. I don’t normally expose them unless I’m with family and friends simply because of their placement. I have just three visible tattoos and they’re almost always covered up, too. Still, I’m okay with having that information out there.

While I don’t normally agree with putting very private, sensitive information out for the public to consume, here’s why I’m okay with having that information in the public realm until the internets dissolve:

1. I carefully thought about what I put out there. I didn’t rush either of the posts and tried to make them relevant to others.
2. They accurately portray my personality. Nothing is false, no pretenses.
3. I don’t say anything negative about anyone or anything else.

Posting these things would generally go against my personal online branding standards, my online brand is continually evolving just as the internet and the ways in which we communicate evolve.

The internet ruins everything.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, almost my entire life is spent online. Between work, communicating, watching television, paying bills, or selling my handmade items, I’d guestimate that 95% of my awake time is spent online. (I even wrote most of this post from a Metro train and I saved each time I hit a station with cell reception.)

Maybe it’s just my obsessive hyperconnectedness that causes me to check Twitter, Facebook and email several times an hour or maybe it’s a nervous tic I’m developing. Last night, I actually plotted how I could gain the “Brooklyn 4 Life” Foursquare badge (requires 25 separate check-ins at various Brooklyn locations) in two days’ time.

I’m beginning to think the Internet, and various technologies, are ruining everything good and wholesome about life.

Here are a few reasons:

• The Internet easily turns you into a stalker. No one can claim innocence here. Everyone has a little bit of stalker in them and social media encourages it. Just like everything in life, it’s okay in moderation, right? But, where’s that line between finding out your crush’s favorite band and guessing how many people he’s dated in the past 6 months by checking his facebook wall/status updates?
• The Internet makes people want to share things instantly — even live events. Maybe I’m a sucker, but I’m 24 years old and I still love surprises. Live tweeting might be one of the worst “inventions” to come out of social media, yet, again, I’ve done it before. [I'm more likely to live tweet my visit to my favorite cupcake store or cooking dinner, but I still do it.] Not only does it ruin the feeds of every person following you, but you’re not saying anything original about what’s going on.

  Long before the days of Tivo, Twitter, and Hulu, you either caught your favorite show live or you didn’t see it at all. Missing an episode of Friends or Seinfeld meant you’d have to hope it shows up in re-runs over the summer. Websites dedicated to uncovering the mysteries of the smoke monster/The Man In Black wouldn’t have existed. Now, if you’re not home at 9pm on Tuesdays, yet you still want to check your Facebook or Twitter feeds, you’re almost guaranteed to have the entire episode of Lost spoiled for you.

• The Internet ruins past-times. Again, something I’m guilty of. I used to read and write all the time, now I struggle to open a book or read something other than the front page of CNN.com or Entertainment Weekly. I long for the feeling of reading a good book, but I just don’t. Instead of bringing a book along for my morning commute, I refresh my TweetDeck before I get on Metro and read updates I missed from the night before.
• The Internet wants me to connect to people and things with whom I don’t want to be connected. While I appreciate the new “community” pages on Facebook, I find the sharing options to be incredibly annoying. I’m not an organized person, but I keep my internet browsing very separated. Everyone I know on Facebook doesn’t need to know what I’m reading on CNN.com (or the embarrassing stations I listen to on Pandora).

What are some things the internet ruins for you?

Nothing is private if you put it online.

It’s been exactly 362 days since I was laid off and, in that year, I’ve learned a lot about myself personally and professionally. I’ve figured out what I don’t want to do with my life (work in the music industry), what I do want to do with my life (work for a progressive nonprofit communications firm), and how to get there (work as hard as I possibly can). To get there, I have to do certain things.

Hard work is the number one priority. As soon as I got laid off, the first thing I did (after sulking for a week and watching all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica) was apply for jobs and internships. Then, I built myself an online brand. That brand, now updated to what you see today, took three months to develop and become fruitful.

Never once did I consider removing my name from Facebook or canceling my Twitter account – I shouldn’t be afraid of these forums. I know they can never truly be hidden on the internet, but I can control what people find out about me by limiting the things I put online. Instead, I used Facebook and Twitter, in addition to a blog, to leverage my social media experience into a job.

No, not everyone wants to go into social media marketing for nonprofits. But don’t try to pretend that you’re not online when you really are.

I came across this article today in which people (probably around my age) were altering their social media lives during their job search. One interviewee stated that he changed his name on Facebook so that he was unsearchable only to discover that you can search for people via email addresses. He’s since changed his name back.

He later claims that Facebook is a private space and that “too many people take pictures of you. [He] didn’t want to go through and ‘untag’ all of them.”

So, you want a job, but you’re too lazy to go in and untag photos of yourself? That’s not a good sign, sir.

I passed along the article and my boss and I shared a few quick emails about our initial reactions to the article:

Me: I find it unbelievable that they’re talking about changing their names on Facebook so they don’t come up in searches, but they still use their real names to be quoted in an article on CNN.com.

My boss: My only surprise would be to learn that this is just now starting to happen, but maybe that’s because I’m from a generation that doesn’t think exposing every aspect of my life and daily doings online is normal. Could it really be true that there are youngsters out there who are just now realizing that their online profiles could hurt them in the eyes of employers (and beyond)?

We both took particular exception to two quotes:

“There’s nothing illegal or too ridiculous in the photos … but people don’t take pictures of people studying or doing school work. They take pictures of people at parties and doing silly things.”

Her response: …but people ALSO take pictures of other people traveling overseas and broadening their horizons; attending cultural events; partaking in healthy outdoor activities; sharing holidays with the family; etc. etc. There’s a whole world of wholesome, employer-friendly photo topics out there.

I’d never actually thought about it like this, but she’s completely right. There are no pictures of me anywhere on the internet of me being drunk or dressed inappropriately… mostly because I don’t do those things, but if I did, I’d have the good sense not to publish them online where they can be shared, downloaded, and indexed by billions of people whether I know them or not.

“Such prying into his online life makes Gawel uncomfortable.”

My response: As someone who works in social media, it’s perplexing that people don’t understand that your profile is out there for everyone to read or search for, unless you’re very familiar with privacy settings. Even then, that doesn’t stop someone else from reposting what you write into a public forum. It’s a page on the internet. How could you stop someone from seeing it?

I, too, have skeletons in my internet persona closet. In my senior year of college, a roommate and I got into a verbal argument which resulted in her physically harming me. Instead of taking issue with the University (they punished both of us), she took to her LiveJournal and spread damaging lies about me… using my full name. Knowing I couldn’t go to her and ask her to remove it, I made a note of this blemish in interviews and cover letters if I thought the hiring managers might search for me. I did so for a year or two until it no longer appeared in the top Google search results for my name.

As someone who got a job by bolstering my social media presence instead of hiding inappropriate photos of myself, here are some tips (whether you want them or not) about what you should – or should not – do when looking for a job:

• Don’t complain about other people in your status updates. If you absolutely need to vent your frustrations, don’t use their real name or allude to who you might be talking about.
• Don’t post pictures of other people and mock them online. I don’t think I need to describe this further.
• Don’t do something in view of cameras that you wouldn’t do in front of your current/potential boss. You may not be Michael Phelps, but someone will find these embarrassing photos some day and it will come back to bite you.
• Connect with people who do what you want to do. Easy enough, right? I wanted to go into nonprofit communications, so I followed the top nonprofit communications experts on Twitter and started retweeting them, communicating with them, and following their blogs. They may not know who I am, but I learned valuable lessons from them and kept my online persona clean.

What are some of your social media persona tips?

Change of subscription.

While I was job hunting, I signed up for a lot of different things – Twitter feeds, e-mail alerts, listing services… you name it. Many of the subscriptions went away shortly after I unsubscribed from them, or unfollowed them on Twitter.

The one resource I used the least has also proved to be the most annoying – Vault.com. I originally subscribed to Vault a few years back when I was looking for paid internships, but found absolutely nothing, and resubscribed during the Big Job Hunt of ’09.

I’ve unsubscribed dozens of times, yet I continue to receive emails. First, the unsubscribe feature was down for a few weeks. I’d go to unsubscribe through the bottom of an email, but I’d receive an error message every time. Instead, I used the “Spam” function for the first time in Gmail, but obviously to no avail.

After dozens more emails the spam filter didn’t catch, the unsubscribe feature began working and I found out I wasn’t even subscribed to a list. At one point, I even took a screen shot showing just that.

Now, I’ve resorted to setting a filter to automatically delete every email from Vault.com that comes into my Gmail account. Let’s see if that works… If not, I’ll have to resort to writing a much more scathing blog post about Vault.

Am I already an ‘Old Fogey’?

I grew up in a log cabin on a mountain no fewer than 3 miles away from the nearest paved road. We had a land line for phone calls, but didn’t have cable. When it snowed, we stayed indoors for days at a time and never expected anyone to come plow us out. We had winter tires and still put chains on them if we wanted to go out and the only time ‘we’ tested this was when my mom delivered me during the blizzard of January ’86.

Finding out you had a snow day as a kid was so different than it is now. I remember begging my mom to let me go to sleep later because school was going to be closed tomorrow… then waking up super early in the morning to watch my school closing to scroll across the news screen. My county started with a W, so I had to wait a really long time to catch a glimpse of the official closing. If a commercial break came while my school was scheduled to be announced or I blinked for a second and missed it, TOO BAD, I had to watch all the A-V schools be announced again.

While I understand that that was almost 20 years ago, it’s still amazing to think about how much has changed since then. During last week’s historic storms, I got 99% of my information from the internet (mostly on my cell phone) moments after announcements – closures of metro, government, or businesses – were made.

My office goes by the federal government’s snow policy, so if they’re closed, we’re closed. Well, Office of Personnel Management closed the government four days in a row last week. Unlike growing up, they did so promptly – almost every night before 8pm. The first day or two, I kept refreshing the OPM website anxiously hoping they’d update the site. Then, I discovered that following the right people on Twitter gets me the information much quicker!

While I was reflecting on the differences between snow days as a kid and snow days as an adult, I thought about this incredible article I recently came across in The New York Times about the rapid implementation and integration of technology and cyberspace in our daily lives. The article discusses how quickly generational gaps will develop, and how small those gaps will be among age groups. Conceivably, vast differences could be seen when comparing say my little brother’s first grade class to the kids in his elementary school’s Pre-K program.

I don’t see myself personally falling victim to this new digital divide at this point in my life… I mean, I did find the article online because I have Google reader that picks out articles like this for me to read. But, I do notice my friends falling behind already. Practically none of my close, personal friends are on Twitter or Facebook and, while they understand the value of what I do with my life and how I do it, they have very little comprehension of what goes into it and how it can be beneficial to my organization. Also, this sentence rings true for me already:

“They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone.”

I absolutely want instant gratification when I send an email, @message to someone on Twitter, or a Gchat message. Sometimes, I’ll get it, but not always.

I recently had a conversation with someone where I basically got all my online neuroses out, verbally… for the first time. These are some online pet peeves I have:

• You should be on Gmail. If you’re not, why? There’s really no web-based alternative that is superior to Gmail. I promise.
• If you’re not in highschool, your screen names should be your real names or something close. Everything you do can be found online whether you want it to be or not, so you may as well put your real name on it. Try something out, Google your “Firstname Last name” (in the quote marks like that) and tell me that your first few results aren’t your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (assuming you have those… which you should!).
• Don’t act like privacy settings will actually block people from seeing information you publish online that you don’t want them to see. Yeah, no one reads the fine print and it’s generally accepted that no one will. For all we know, we’re signing away our first-born to send out messages in 140 characters or less, but don’t expect the information to not be indexed by a search engine or republished by the platform you’re using to publish information. Also, don’t expect someone else you’ve deemed suitable to read your information to not republish it. Online publishing and conversation isn’t about controlling the conversation you’re involved in, but being a positive part of it.

While I have, and recognize, these online neuroses, I think the most important thing is that I still have the foundation to go out and find the information on my own. Technically, I may sit back and wait for things to come to me, but it’s because I’ve signed up for a newsletter or an update to be sent to my email address as soon as breaking news occurs or because I’ve figured out the best news sources to follow on Twitter (@welovedc and @DCist_Updates).

My dad and stepmom might not be the most tech-savvy people, but my little brother still gets the coolest electronics for Christmas and his birthday (this year he only got a Wii and called to let me know he opened just a few presents). Every year, I make a stringent effort to buy my little brother as few “tech” toys as possible so he gets a lot of handmade things and books so that he still has a thirst for things he can touch, feel, and investigate himself.

When I think about things like this, I do think I’m being a little old-fashioned (or an old fogey as the article so kindly terms those of us in our mid-to-late twenties). But, as much as I love working with the internet and the interesting way you can communicate via this forum, I still love to create things with my hands, repurpose items in my house, and explore things without using the Google Maps app on my iPhone.

Maybe he won’t be helpless as the article suggests, and maybe the internet and over-connectedness of my little brother’s generation will spark more insightful ways to discover new information than Googling and Tweeting. Only time will tell. This old fogie will be sitting back and watching from the comfort of my computer the whole time.