The First MOO

The first time I attempted to water ski, my cadre of well-meaning instructors failed to emphasize the importance of one seemingly obvious directive: when you fall, let go of the rope. You might think that would be second nature, but to the 8-year-old mind, letting go of the rope, and thus the boat and my only connection with the safety of dry land, was anything but natural. It was counter-intuitive.

Fortunately, I didn't drown. But for a few very long moments, I imagined I might. Searching for air, I felt disoriented and completely at the mercy of the motor boat.

Maybe a dramatic analogy, but I've jumped into the social media river (or been pushed? :-)and it feels more like a tidal wave. I can't seem to come up, but I don't want to let go either.

After my first MOO, and before I created this blog, I typed out a response to no one in particular. I will post it here as my first official blog, since that's really what it was:

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January 19, 2011

I learned a lot last night in my first MOO encounter. It was a blur, so I’m still processing. I had to go back over the transcript this morning and reread every comment; I totally missed some good ones. And I made a ‘character list’ for this journey, writing down everything that each of you shared about yourselves. That’s the thing about online relationships—being a fairly visual person, I struggle to put that composite picture together in my mind without the face to face contact.

So rather than putting together some web content, which I am supposed to be doing right now, I’m thinking about this class, and the ‘rhetoric’ from last night. Here are my observations and thoughts that I would have inserted, had I not been a tad overwhelmed trying to keep up. In keeping with the theme of the class, they are in no particular order.

When I logged off and sat thinking back to all I had just read, I found myself frustrated, knowing that I had just participated in a vibrant, interaction, with people from all over the globe, yet unable to remember or hold on to much of it. To me, it represented the nature of social networking and personal agency in a microcosm.

I met a bunch of interesting new people, how many, I wasn’t even sure until I reread this morning. I watched you go by like a fast moving train, catching glimpses now and then of a face or a voice, and thinking how fun it would be to have a conversation. You’re all smart and witty and incredibly intelligent. Intimidating even. But every face was a blur, there and gone. I listened, yet wouldn’t say we really conversed, because that would imply that there was dialogue back and forth, and it moved much too fast for that. It was loud, and social, and loosely organized, kind of like a dinner party, with everyone having their own conversations at once. Takes some getting used to.

I live in The Woodlands, TX, which is about 35 miles north of Houston. I have been working from home for the past 15 years as a ghostwriter and editor for a self-started publishing company. We partner with a non-profit ministry organization and do conferences across the US. I’m also currently working as a consultant for a local radio station on some web content (the thing I need to be working on which I’m not). This is an area of growing interest to me and I find it a fascinating new (to me) arena for writing.

I love to write, but admittedly only about things that I can muster some passion for. Otherwise, it’s really laborious. I enjoy reading, although I do it slowly. I sort of absorb books more than read them. And I’m a thinker, a contemplative kind of person. In a room full of people (or apparently also a MOO), I tend to listen more than I talk. Other people interest me. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, but I like to process, and chew, and think, and then speak. It’s not a quality that lends itself easily to social media, where conversations happen at wireless speed and everything is in tweet sized parcels. How in the world do you train your brain to think that way? Mine doesn’t. In a few years, maybe people like me will become extinct due to natural selection, trampled by the speed of this new rhetoric.

So obviously this is my first class in MATC, but I’m actually not even in the program yet. I discovered it too late to apply for spring, but couldn’t wait until fall to start. I’d been thinking about a Master’s for a long time, but never was motivated enough I guess until I found this. I read the class descriptions online like a menu in my favorite restaurant. It was a moment of epiphany, that something so tailored to the things I love, or want to love, existed. I was too excited! Joyce was nice enough to humor me by giving me this class, even as I’m perched out on the proverbial limb.

At 43, I think of myself as being pretty tech savvy, or I did. Although I do still keep my calendar on a paper ‘day runner’ (the same one I’ve had for 15 years….I buy the refills every December), I love my iphone, mess around on Facebook, and live on my computer. However, I discovered last night that I am, I’m afraid, to the new waves of social media and technology like Fred Flinstone would be to modern transportation.

I observed in last night’s conversation an interesting thing about social media. While ‘personal agency’ has a rhetoric of its own, which I guess we are attempting to explore, within each community, there is a unique dialect that defines and connects the members (and possibly keeps others out). People new to the community may find it hard to jump in until they’ve learned the lingo. This is, of course, true in ‘f2f’ communities also, but the effects are compounded when interaction is stripped of all other forms of communication, leaving only the dialogue.

I also observed, as I already made reference to, that the media age presses communication into tiny, bite sized pieces, rewarding the quick-witted, efficient mind and eschewing contemplation by its very structure. Does that make it shallow? Maybe. It’s a soundbite environment…wide, but not necessarily very deep (can you say ADD?) It doesn’t sit on the porch and sip tea. It is in constant motion.

Much of what I know about social media I’ve learned from my teenager. Perhaps this digital transformation is making this upcoming generation more flexible and adaptable as you discussed last night. But what concerns me is that a new set of social ‘rules of engagement’ seem to be lagging far behind. The idea about shifting the power from adults to young people has some truth, but it’s not just about empowerment, it’s about connection, or disconnection. My comment about boys who used to have to go through mom or dad to speak with girlfriend, now have free (meaning no restraints) and total access, 24/7. One of the costs of leveling the rhetorical playing field through social media is the loss of social hierarchy, which may seem like a good thing, but it has a slippery downside. Without hierarchy, respect loses its context. Respect for time, for privacy, for age, for position…many of my daughters friends and people her age have NO idea how to interact with an adult because they’ve never had to learn. It’s hard to teach your child that it’s important to address her friend’s mother as “Mrs. Walker” when she never has any occasion to have to speak to Mrs. Walker. That something has been lost in the transition is evident in reports of suicides brought on by shocking disregard for the power of transmission and any concept of propriety. That’s what I was thinking when I asked, “Young people know how to operate the technology, but do they know how to use it?” It isn’t inherently good or bad in and of itself. Not until we give it a purpose.