“The things people do out of sheer boredom! They study out of boredom; they pray out of boredom; they fall in love, get married and reproduce out of boredom; in the end they die out of boredom.”

It was the German author Georg Büchner who put these words into the mouth of his protagonist in the comedy Leonce and Lena written in 1836. And if we take it literally, the proposition of boredom as the prime motivating force in life (and death) seems like a bad joke.

But before we throw out the baby with the bathwater, let’s put the bias on hold for a second and reconsider the role of boredom in the 21st century.

A Brief Anatomy Of Boredom

The English word ‘boredom’ first appears in Dickens’ novel Bleak House in 1852 and perhaps it is no coincidence that it appeared at a time which also saw a rapid increase of steam-powered engines and mechanical contraptions. Was boredom a new privilege bestowed upon the masses by the rise of machine labor? Did pre-industrial man never get bored, or did he simply lack the vocabulary?

It remains to be seen whether boredom is a symptom of (technological) development or a fundamental part of our psychological furnishing. But at one point or another we all experienced that sensation described by psychologists as “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.”

Many philosophers have written about the topic, among them Martin Heidegger who has contributed lengthy treatises in which he argues that one should attune oneself to this seemingly negative mood rather than shrug it off in the ordinary understanding:

Isn’t that exactly the attitude we still have towards boredom today? The very idea of it seems to conflict with our notions of purpose and a “fulfilled life”. “Hard-working people don’t get bored,” we say. “They are too busy to get bored.”

Boredom In The Age Of Social Media

Clay Shirky recently said something in an interview (which I quoted before) that a lot of people (including myself) can relate to:

 I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

When was the last time you felt utterly bored sitting on a train, standing in line, staring out of your window on a grey afternoon? It just doesn’t happen that much anymore, does it? Nowadays people browse their Twitter feeds on their iPhones while standing in line, whack away at the keyboards of their laptops in trains and flood their eyeballs with a constant feed of “all you can eat” movie subscriptions à la Netflix at home.

And maybe what Sam Anderson said about playing games like “Angry Birds” is also true for many other activities now filling the time once occupied by boredom: “They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits.”

Is boredom dying out? Do we need to prescribe small dosages of boredom to escape the vicious cycle of inane activity? Can reading help bridge the states of non-doing and over-doing?

When I was a teenager and had prolonged access to computers for the first time in my life, I began to notice that it was possible to be bored in front of the computer, moving the cursor around my desktop and arranging files and folders in idle patterns. This was pre-Internet.

Later, I found out that it’s also possible to be bored online, mindlessly hopping from link to link, refreshing profiles, numbly scrolling through newsfeeds.

In a sense, as much as I agree with Shirky that we’re experiencing less and less pure boredom, Social Media and the state of “always on, always connected” seems to put us into a condition where we are neither fully experiencing activity or boredom. It’s a hybrid-state of distraction and exhaustion.

And I remember the presenter of the popular German children TV series “Löwenzahn” addressing himself to the audience while the end-credits were rolling: “Now turn off the TV! Do something else!”

It’s not that we heeded his advice, mind you. On the contrary, we mocked him and continued on our inevitable trajectory of media consumption.

But at least it planted the idea in our heads hat there is, in fact, an alternative to electronic activity, one that we’re increasingly losing sight of in the age of microblogging and hypernetworking:

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img credit: chairs: Some rights reserved by limonada / candle: Some rights reserved by Simon Greig (xrrr)

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

When I first heard the term “digital content curation” I thought of Picasso-peddling online arts merchants, vernissages on Facebook and high heeled iPhone users staggering through Italian designer boutiques.

But what does it really mean?

Traditionally, the term curator refereed to a person who selects, manages and collects works of art or (cultural artifacts of any kind) in a museum, art gallery, library, etc.

Digital content curation seemed to be the buzzword of 2011. A digital content curator does more or less the same things as his analog equivalent, except he deals with digital works of art, bits of information, etc.

Where The Academic And The Layman Intersect

There seem to be two ends of the spectrum here. In its best sense, digital content curation could refer to gargantuan projects like archive.org which collects, files and stores all kinds of digital content for future generations, from old movies and advertising clips and newsreels to student films and much more. A lot of this content is in the public domain and can be used in all kinds of projects. When I was hosting a little experimental TV program with friends, for example, we relied heavily on the Prelinger archive for its infinite reels of footage.

But this complex archiving and building of digital libraries is only one example of digital content curation.

On the other side of the spectrum we have (micro)blogging such as Twitter and Tumblr and services like paper.li or scoop.it!, or even Facebook, all of whose users are participating in digital content curation, whether directly by posting and summarizing, or by reblogging, retweeting and sharing.

The idea here is that we’re drowning in an ocean of information and we desperately need people who select, store and manage these mind-boggling amounts of data so that we can consume them more easily.

Many of the people I follow on Twitter are great curators of obscure and/or unique finds. Together with Reddit and Instapaper they have long replaced the daily newspaper for me (not that I ever liked the huge flapping paper thing) and with their help I find articles, videos and news I could never find by consuming a prepackaged magazine or newspaper alone.

On the other hand, I’ve dabbled a bit with content curation myself, both on my personal Twitter account and on our Learn Out Live Tumblr and my experience with it was and still is … ambivalent.

Content Curation As Ersatz-Creativity

There seems to be a growing notion that in an age of informational abundance curating content equals creating content. And while I do see the importance, necessity and benefits of having people sift through the daily torrents of bits and bytes to order, summarize and distribute materials, there’s also a growing sense of wariness, at least on my part.

There’s just so much content out there that I could spend my whole day just sifting through Tumblrs, twitter accounts, blogs and RSS feeds, selecting the interesting bits, grouping, tagging, and redistributing my finds.

And what I’ve found is that it generates a very different experience than actually creating content. It feels like moving horizontally through an endless expanse of stuff, sighting content from an objective bird’s-eye view of the mind, horizons forever receding. It feels rather impersonal and detached, in other words and couldn’t be further from the intensely personal and psychological adventure of creating things on my own. Even the most mediocre drawing or short story I can produce is still more meaningful to me than the most awesome regurgitated content. And if I didn’t organize my day in a way that encourages creative activity, I would soon drown in an ocean of curation.

In an age of Social Media we’ve all become content curators. Everyone who posts a Bob Dylan video on Facebook, who puts an “inspirational” poster on Pinterest, who reblogs vintage movie clips on Tumblr, tweets Marylin Monroe quotes, we’re all sifting endlessly through a neverending flow of information, constantly rehashing past centuries, infinitely reiterating, like pressing repeat on the record-player of human history.

But does it really replace creating works of our own, finding a voice and learning to “speak” with paintings, music and words?

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img:  Some rights reserved by onesevenone

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

I haven’t yet deleted (sorry, it’s not possible to delete one’s Facebook account, I meant of course “temporarily deactivated”) my Facebook account. The only reason I still “exist” there is because I need to keep a few pages and apps alive, and no – there seems to be no easy way to transfer these to a new account.

So, when I use Facebook once in a while in the form of replying to a private message or group thread, I do it via email. Social necessities are being met, and I don’t need to set foot into the colorblind world of the brain-sucking Book Of Faces. Period.

And while I described here how to use a Chrome app to block Facebook, I recently opted for an even deeper approach, allowing me to not just avoid the time-wasting but also block the infamous Like-Button and it’s cookies on all browsers at all times.

Having said that, there are far more fun, creative and stimulating ways to waste time! *cough*

1. Reddit

This is a platform that many people shy away from due to its somewhat clunky-looking interface. In many ways it is the opposite of Facebook and a true example of what an Internet community can look like in all its glory (and gore).

• Instead of just giving a lobotomized thumbs up or staying silent, users can downvote! Let’s face it, some posts on Social Networks are really bad and they don’t deserve “Likes”, they scream for a clear and unequivocal NO!
• Going through the hundreds of sub-reddits there are thriving communities of witty and knowledgeable individuals to be found about almost any topic from linguistics to, well… birds with arms?.
• It’s anonymous. People don’t have pictures or extensive background-info. There’s just a nickname and the value of the written word or posted content. And it seems to make for a lot more revealing, intensive debates.

2. Tumblr

If there’s one way to describe Tumblr I’d say it’s a blogging platform for people too lazy to write or a visuals-based Twitter. Here are few of my favourite things:

• you get your own blog and full control over the look & feel (edit the source-code until satisfied)
• follow other blogs or tags and find interesting new materials around a certain topic
• see something that you like? hit reblog and it now appears on your blog in all its glory

3. Twitter

Many people don’t get Twitter. Facebooking seems so easy. But Twitter? What to do with it? How to use it? And these hash-tags? It all seems too much, so people rather post more baby photos and “inspirational” quotes on their walls. But here’s why Twitter is awesome:

• pin-point certain users or topics to receive live-updates about almost anything
• get bite-sized novelty input in the shape of articles, videos, images and witty 140 character statements
• send your own Tweets out into space. Most of them won’t get a comment. And they don’t have to. People acknowledge tweets, sometimes they retweet or respond but generally the experience is of a great field of ambient connectivity.

Note: Using Twitter effectively will take a while. It’s all about “following” the right people and not following too many. Once you get a batch of interesting folks, the party begins.

Conclusion: Even besides Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit there are tons of other wacky ways to spend or (waste) time on the Internet. So, why Facebook? Just because “everybody’s doing it”? Or is there really some deep unfathomable value to clicking Like until the cows come home?

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 img:  Some rights reserved by Lillais.Burke

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

She said something to the effect of: “Well, you see I’m not sitting in front of the screen all day long, I do understand that people who are working with computers will often quickly check Facebook during the day, but I just don’t have time for that.”

Thinking about this, it seems that her concept of Facebooking (far from being any kind of “productivity tool”) relates more to the cigarette or coffee break of 20th century office workers: to quickly check out of work and into some idle conversation.

Now, these breaks have been keeping office drones alive for decades, head above the waterline of work, quick injections of socialized and caffeinated distraction.

But there are only so many breaks a worker can take during a day before her work will stack up and his boss come knocking.

The Infinite Coffee Break

With the Facebook Break on the other hand, we have an entirely different species of diversion.

In the innocent belief that it’s “only a few seconds” the worker will continuously check in, while these seconds silently add up to minutes and hours. Facebook is a never-ending coffee-break, in other words. And not just that, it’s constantly accessible, just a click away.

Add to this the fact that Facebook has encroached so much onto our work and private lives that your job may even require going to Facebook, whether to retrieve a client’s lost email or phone-number or to invite colleagues (who don’t read their email but do check their Facebook) to an important meeting.

In this sense, Facebook is the perfect example how our modern concept of work is increasingly fused with pleasure. Another example are the offices of Google or Lego that look more like playgrounds than workplaces. The Workplace has long ago stopped to be just a place of work. Now it’s the hipster’s first frontier, a surrogate family, a lifestyle choice.

Peculiarities Of Facebook Standard Time

I’ve already discussed the problem of Facebook striving to become an Internet within the Internet, a walled garden, pruned of all dangers and excitement: flattened blue & white boredom. Read the article Why Facebook is Not the Internet or: The Difference between Leading and Cheerleading for more information)

The implications of this are hard to exaggerate, for it seems that anything posted on Facebook enters some kind of gargantuan centrifuge that strips it of all meaning and context.

I’m not sure how this works exactly, but it seems to have to do with the fact that anything dropped into this well is dressed up in blue & white uniform and set marching in line – flanked by billions of fellow Newsfeed items – all racing towards some end-point of absolute meaninglessness.

Somehow, the word Gleichschaltung comes to mind.

Even the most controversial or despicable content seems to be flattened out by this Great Equalizer, stripped of its dimension and context by likes and comments, spiraling towards some kind of lobotomized permanent repository along with billions of holiday snapshots and drooling pets or babies.

Delete History: A Mission Impossible

These latent feelings regarding Facebook recently became amplified when I set out for a simple experiment: to see if it was possible to “reset” a profile by removing all likes and posts and start out fresh.

What started out as an idle idea quickly turned into hours of frustrated and ultimately futile attempts. I looked for a “delete history” button: negative. I tried to use different macros to automate the task of deleting items, one by one, off the wall. Many of the “recipes” posted by other users trying to accomplish the same didn’t work, some of them just a few weeks old, posted along with their apologies that Facebook “kept changing stuff”. Some of them worked partially, they deleted parts of the new “Timeline”. But ultimately, there seems to be no way to “wipe” a Facebook profile.

In doing all of this I noticed a few things:

• Facebook fastidiously categorizes all actions on their Network in groups such as “Likes”, “Posts”, etc. making it impossible to centrally access all of the data.

• As easy as it is to add new stuff, once you start trying to remove it, a lot of bugs appear, among them:

switching to the old profile view by downgrading the “user-agent” to Internet Explorer 6 or 7, only a part of the posts show up. – switching between the mobile site and the main site, there seem to be severe discrepancies between content: what shows here doesn’t show there. – trying to delete “likes” of pages, companies, etc. on a personal profile keeps older “likes” present even after removing everything on screen, making the former essentially immortal and irremovable aspects of a user profile.

It may be that these bugs were only related to the browser or system that I was using, but for that they seemed far too diverse and commonplace.

I couldn’t help shake the feeling that Facebook was either really clumsily built or militantly asserting its territory and protecting my content from deletion.

In the end, you can’t blame them. It’s their servers. Whatever you put there, it’s theirs. Your content and preferences, meticulously entered into its database is the fabric of their business model. It’s the old “If You’re Not Paying for It You’re the Product” and never did I realize it more than after this little experiment.

And as usual, I have to admit that while Facebook is an easy target, Google and Twitter and others are no saints, either.

In the end, if you want a certain amount of control on the net, you’ll have to rent your own web space. Period.

Related Articles:

The New Facebook: Your Life Story in Likes Or: The Perfect Surveillance Machine

Why Facebook is Not the Internet or: The Difference between Leading and Cheerleading

How To Use Facebook Without Using Facebook In A Few Simple Steps

Where’s Your Home On The Internet? Of Refugee Camps and (B)log Cabins

How The Like-Button Killed All Credibility

How To Give Facebook A Face-Lift!

Are We Using Social Media Or is Social Media Using Us?

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img:  Some rights reserved by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

So, how do you go about capturing the attention of students? With everything going on, you may feel that education takes a back burner, but studies show that people are attending online school in unprecedented numbers and that this trend will only continue.

Capturing and holding students’ attention is more vital now than ever. Here are a few tips for how to gain plenty of engaged students

1. Online Presence: Potential online students probably already spend a lot of time online. Seems simple. To find them, try using a mix of conventional and unconventional methods. Facebook is the undisputed king of the Internet, so you can bet that each student-to-be is on the site nearly every waking moment. But, Facebook is not a magic genie for spreading your information. If you want to use Facebook to capture students’ attention, you’ll have to put time in on your end.

Avoid spamming anyone’s Facebook walls with links. Instead, check out pages and groups that are related to your subject and see which people are engaged. If you’re teaching an online French course, aim for French language and culture pages. Tastefully spread the word about your course. People are at differing levels of course, but there are likely beginners who are interested in learning a language.

You can also use less conventional online tools like email marketing to spread the word. Email is still an influential tool when used correctly. Do not send more than one or two emails a week to recipients, and send them during times that are convenient and when people are likely to check (work hours during weekdays, or daytime hours over weekends).

2. Twitter

Twitter is a fantastic tool for holding someone’s attention. Once you’ve gathered students for your Intro to French course, encourage them to interact with French-speaking Twitter accounts. Classroom learning can be dry, but hopping on Twitter and reading 140 characters written by French-speaking persons is both simple and exciting. This is an excellent way to learn basic words, slang and pick up on aspects of French culture.

Encourage your students to tweet in French to each other, or to those they follow. They can also use Twitter to find other great French websites, as tweeted by whomever they choose to follow.

3. Keep Looking Forward: Losing interest in a class that feels like it’s going nowhere is easy to do. Use social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) to show students French sites and videos they can interact with once their skills are up to par. Have Skype conversation days set aside to help students develop their writing and reading skills. Show students where their skills could one day take them.

Though everyone seems to be competing for our attention, people are still making time for online learning. Using these tools and tricks, you can build a strong, committed and attentive group of students.

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img:  Some rights reserved by robotson via flickr

About the author: Henry Fitzgerald is a technology consultant located in Seattle. When he isn’t geeking out over the latest social media platforms and Apple gadgets, he enjoys spending his time sailing and attempting to cook. Follow him on Twitter or read more about the latest tech news at technected.com

Although no true Panopticon has ever been built, examples in the online world are eerily close.

The Underclass Of Sharing

In a brilliant Guardian piece, Adrian Short argues that the masses using “free” web services are third class-citizens without any real rights or freedoms.

They are turning into a new under-class, not only because users of sites like Facebook  have no say in the way things are done, they are in fact selling their lives as grease for the big advertisement machines.

Sounds crass?

Every relationship change, every status about food, every baby photo keeps the colossus humming along.

Remember: If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product

And, as we all know, due to the mapping of our real-world relationships, it’s almost impossible to quit or not to use Facebook.

Sure, you can deactivate and/or ignore the Facebook world but also you will be the only one who hasn’t received that invitation to that special event, who hasn’t seen the important photos of business-meetings and therefore is no longer in the loop.

As Short put it: “Once you’ve signed up the cost of leaving increases with every ‘friend’ you make”

Privacy Wars, New World Language & Data Krakens

Facebook tries to collect as much data about a person as possible. A lot of this we do willingly. We like and comment and soon we will be able to “walk” and “eat” as well. Facebook keeps this data and uses it to tweak its advertising revenues.

If you want to see what kind of data Facebook stores on each and every person, here’s a blacked-out example  [PDF] via europe-v-facebook.org

With Facebooks’s new features, we can share every tiny detail of our lives, filling in the blanks in pre-fabricated sentence slots. As Ben Zimmer writes in his article The Rise of the Zuckerverb: The New Language of Facebook: 

language is being recast in a more profound way, turned into a utilitarian tool for “expressing” relationships to objects in the world in a remarkably unexpressive fashion. Verbs are for doing things, things that are then announced in uncomplicated declarations. Sentences become mere instruments for sharing easy-to-digest morsels of personal information.

And much of this sharing will even happen without us doing anything. Watch a video on Youtube and Facebook will tell the world. Read an article and it shares itself automatically in the “Timeline Of Your Life”. For now, Facebook claims that you’ll be able to opt out of this “frictionless sharing”.

But apart from this, there’s another way in which we constantly submit information to Facebook without even being able to deactivate it: The Like Button.

Even if you don’t click it or aren’t even registered on Facebook, it follows your every move.

Already earlier this year, Facebook was sued for this practice. And in response Facebook has formed a lobby against privacy laws.

But to be quite honest, it’s not only Facebook doing it. It’s just that their particular kind of cookies are very nasty.

Also Google, LinkedIn and others are doing the same.

What To Do?

Considering all of the above, using Facebook can have quite an unsettling aftertaste.

With ever increasing and ever-changing privacy settings, you never know exactly who else sees your family photos and private information – and even if you aren’t on the Facebook homepage – you can never know for sure who is storing and collecting your browsing history – website after website.

Here’s three things you can do, apart from permanently deleting your Facebook account.

1. Obvious: Be very careful as to what kind of information you submit to Facebook in the first place. They have your real name, they know where you work, where you live, your telephone number, email address, previous work history, your family reunion photos, colleagues, former classmates….. Do you really want that?

2. Tweak your Privacy settings

3. Block Tracking-Cookies by using a browser extension such as Priv3 or Ghostery

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 img:  Some rights reserved by andreco

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

One could argue that a part of humanity is already living parallel or “second” lives online, although these are much more complex than just mere “mirror” images or clones of our everyday existence.

Many people wake up and the first thing they do, even while still in bed, is to sign in to their online life on their mobile phones.

What is happening there that’s so interesting, a bystander might ask?

It’s like the morning newspaper, once the “window to the world”, only now it has become a portal to the Data-World, a universe of information, where humanity ventures while waiting for the bus, eating lunch, before, during and after work.

Travelling Without Moving

We stop to “check in” to places with Foursquare. We stop to make an Instagram photo and upload it. We stop to tweet and like. Stop. Go. Click, touch and type.

Our life has become a habitus interruptus – constantly interspersed with distractions from this “other” world.

But are we just passing through this Disneyland of data like ghosts and restless travellers?

Or do we actually have homes, there?

The easiest way to find out if you have made a home online is to look at what’s the first thing you do when you connect.

Do you go to Facebook? Google Plus? Twitter? The New York Times? Check your Email?

The Real Estate of Social Identity

What has made Facebook so big in particular is the way it buys our identities and sells them back to us as a “free service”.

It wants to know when we’re born, where we live, what we look like.

And no matter how much we feed it, it’ll always want more.

What we get in exchange is officially a clean and satisfying representation of our social life but more often than not it simply turns into a mess of narcissistic reactivity: relationship statuses, photos of drunk people, babies and cats.

But all our “friends” are there, right? It’s our home! Its red notifications are like the life-juice coursing through our veins. Get many and feel alive and wanted. Get none and feel dead and obscure.

Side-note: I’m using Facebook as an example here, but Google+, the Holy Grail that to many shall deliver us from the fangs of the Zuckerberg Blues, is not much different.

These profiles and streams may give you the feeling of home. But the moment their service gets momentarily deactivated or god beware! you lose your profile or account, the insight will come crashing down on you with the weight of a thousand mammoths:

What you called home is nothing but a refugee camp. Sure, it’s free but neither do you have any property rights, nor can you change any of its layout or basic structure. And the moment the camp is looted or officially scrapped, all your stuff goes down with it.

It’s like living within a drawing book that allows you to draw only inside of the lines whereas genuine creativity happens when you go beyond the pre-configured options and actions and do something unexpected and surprising, instead.

There are alternatives, of course – and as much as I painted it black here – if you use these Social Networks in the right way they can become a worthwhile extension of whatever you do. But they shouldn’t be at the center.

Blogs Are The Log Cabins of The Internet

The basic housing unit of the Internet is your own website.

This is why it’s called homepage, duh…

For convenience’s sake, let it be a blog. It makes doing stuff more intuitive than looking at impenetrable blocks of code just because you need to change a comma somewhere.

Also, paying a few dollars for it per month be daunting at first but if you think about it that for the price of less than a coffee you can buy the right to do whatever you want to do, online – consider it!

You could build a business. Write a travel blog. Deal out dubious advice. Rant! Obsess! Let out the inner expert on North Korean collectibles… It doesn’t matter what you do.  Your blog  is the equivalent of your own private four walls. It’s a bit like Vegas. What you do there, stays there. And once in a while the masses will make pilgrimages to your blog to feast their hungry eyes on items that went from viral to epidemic!

As in the real world, with rights come responsibility. And with infinite freedom comes infinite responsibility.

But that’s another question.

If you spend a lot of time on the Internet and don’t yet have your own blog, do it now. That means: Your own domain. Crafted and filled with content by yourself. No cheapskates cop-out! Paying for something can also help to make a commitment.

Duplicating photos on Tumblr, doing personality quizzes on Facebook and talking about your cat on Twitter is all great, but if you don’t do yourself the favor and start to build  your own home, no one will do it for you.

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

It’s morning time. You make a coffee, open your browser and type:

f

The required effort is minimal. And Facebook is already loaded before you know if you’re still asleep or awake.

Photos of other people’s babies snap you into awareness. You want to go back to sleep. Wait, that means you must be awake!

You click yourself through the list called “News Feed” which reads like a neverending scroll of irrelevancy.

Downwards.

Clicking “like” as you go along. Reading some statuses and comments and feeling ashamed for the people who wrote them. Smiling, in spite of yourself.

Scrolling down. Clicking “like”.

And “like”… and …

After two hours you can’t remember a thing.

It’s like…

Lobotomy, brought to you by Your Social Network

A few weeks ago, I wrote: “The Facebook experience doesn’t encourage creating new stuff. It encourages commenting and liking.” because the longer you stay on their site the higher the potential ad-revenues.

But let’s not be unfair to Facebook. It’s easy to blame the big fish. This could happen on Twitter, too. Stumbleupon. Google+. Has it ever happened to you that you liked, retweeted, +1ed (ugliest ‘verb’, ever), stumbled something before you completely read an article or watched a video till the end?

It’s a bad habit, mkay.

We’re turning into reactive automatons.

Before we look at a video or an article we check how many likes or retweets it has. There is this conception that the Internet is a democratic medium. On the other hand, the gap between popularity and obscurity is immense.

If your post has no likes, people might not even bother to read it.

If it has thousands of likes, already, people will hit like before even reading it.

The premature liker is not just sending false messages to other readers (“How can you recommend something that you haven’t even seen?”), you’re also inflating the egos of the content-creators.

Writing For ‘Likes’ Is Like Working For Bankruptcy

I’ve seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers than they do. (source)

We content-creators are hungry for attention. Might just as well tell you the truth.

We sit in our caves dredging out blogpost after blogpost and unleashing them into the world, waiting for… something.

We need those things to get likes!

And while, sure, for those doing it for a living, we need traffic to continue the survival of our species but it goes far beyond that:

Content-creators are measuring their value by the like.

When I started publishing stuff online more than 10 years ago there weren’t any fancy stats. Building crude webpages and  slapping on a visitor-counter was as much metrics as you’d get without being the CIA.

Today, it’s all about “social proof”.

But what does it prove if you get ten thousand likes for uploading a video of a kitten landing *flop* on her belly?

That you’re the next Fellini? (fe-lin-i…lol)

That cats don’t always land on their feet?

Limiting the Likes, Rethinking the Retweets

As I suggested here, we should maybe think thrice before posting  a status-update, asking: “Why I am doing this?”

“What am I actually intending with this?”

But the same is true before hitting like. Have I even read the thing? Do I care? Why am I drawing to attention to it, then? Am I trying to lubricate the social plumbing as in: “I liky you, you liky me”?

And it’s also true for content-creators who should ask themselves if they’re writing what they really think or if they limit, cut, censor and lie for a fistful of likes.

Those currencies are evanescent.

Remember Myspace comments?

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img: CC by BFLV

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

But what if you’re not just using Facebook for personal but for professional use?

Professional? Facebook?

Yes, no matter if you like Facebook or not, it is still the world’s biggest referrer of Social Media traffic. It makes up for 65.89 % of Social Media traffic worldwide. (interestingly not Twitter, but StumbleUpon is second)

And traffic is like oxygen in the lungs of start-ups, small businesses, bands and educators. Let’s stop beating around the bush: We all need it.

Bad Design = Bad Experience

Some people look at design as a secondary feature: “It’s how it looks.” But it’s more than that: It’s how it feels, it’s how its built, whether it gives you warm and fuzzy feelings or makes you want to kick and scream.

Take Myspace for example: It was a Sodom & Gomorrah of animated gifs and purple backgrounds with green letters. It allowed users to customize almost anything which made the platform almost unusable.

And this is maybe why Facebook doesn’t give an inch in this respect. It’s take it or leave it.

Luckily, that doesn’t mean you can’t still change it.

Student developer Ansel Santosa created an extension for Google Chrome that lets you change everything about Facebook which is not nailed down.

There have always been user-scripts that allowed you to modify Facebook but Santosa’s “Minimalist for Facebook™” is the most comprehensive and easiest to use that I’ve seen so far.

Here’s a quick rundown of what you can do with it:

Colors, Distractions and Usability

If you’re not red-green color-blind like Mark Zuckerberg (yes, that’s really why Facebook is blue) you might want a change a scene sometimes.  Santosa’s extension lets you:

• change the color of the blue header, background, highlights, etc

Don’t like Facebook’s “theater-mode” for viewing photos? Maybe you sometimes need to download your own pics? Sure, you could go ahead and just “remove &theater” from the URL to switch back to the old picture view but Minimalist for Facebook™ lets you

• turn off the theater mode once and for all. period.

Maybe you really aren’t interested in who “poked” you or the people Facebook suggests as Friends in the sidebar on the right. How about those ads?

• hide one of the sidebar elements or get rid of the whole thing completely.

Another interesting toggle of this extension is to “float the header”, meaning that if you maintain a heavy-traffic Facebook page and working yourself through it scrolling down you can take the header with you, as it were, instead of scrolling back up again.

This extension promises to “Individually hide almost 50 interface elements, custom colors, and more…” and I think that if used correctly it can help to improve your Facebook experience, reduce distraction and increase productivity by making it look and feel the way you need it to.

Whether this will make more people use Facebook again or simply is “hospice” as a friend called it, so far there is no real alternative to Facebook. Google+ is still in Beta.

And especially if you need Facebook for business, chances are you’ll be using it for quite a while.

So, why not make the best of it?

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img: CC by gabo mendoza

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

How We Ate from the Tree of Free Music and Got Kicked out of Paradise

To kids growing up today who regularly put iTunes coupons on their Christmas wish-list it might seem weird, but Napster actually allowed you to download as many songs as you wanted, for free, before the lawyers of Metallica, Madonna, Dr. Dre and many others finally forced the platform to shut down.

The magic behind this (free music for everyone, not the suing!) was Napster’s peer-to-peer network. You could share all the music you had on your computer with everyone on the planet and in return download everything they had.

So, what is peer to peer (P2P) anyway?

A P2P network is de-centralized. There is no central server that everyone is forced to go through. Put simply, everyone is connected to everyone directly.

Lawsuits instead of Business-Models

Unfortunately, since Napster’s shutdown, P2P has become increasingly demonized. It’s used in the same breath as file-sharing and piracy or “stealing”. And, as I explained in “A Mindful Guide to Social Media”, demonizing file-sharing neither stops people from doing it, nor does it replace coming up with new business models.

In short: The technology is not the problem. It’s the inflexibility of old corporate structures to adapt to the winds of change.

For now, let’s just note that P2P and “illegal file-sharing” are actually two different topics. The former is a technological infrastructure while the latter is a legal concept.

Also, there is such a thing as legal file-sharing using P2P technology such as BitTorrent which is widely used for enabling fast downloads of Linux distributions and other open source projects.

But there are also a lot of other things that you can with P2P technology apart from file-sharing.

Peer-to-Peer Language Learning

This is what we do here at Learn Out Live. We connect teachers with students by using a very popular peer-to-peer software: Skype.

Yes, Skype works on a P2P basis. And it works so well for language learning that I’ve written a whole book about it explaining how anyone can become an online teacher by doing this.

Bottom line: No need to run a high-maintenance server: More space for actual learning.

There is of course other P2P software you could use but Skype is simply the best (at the moment) for a simple reason: Everybody uses it.

Also, the fact that Skype recently was bought by Microsoft shows again: P2P technology doesn’t have to end in a lawsuit disaster but can become a highly profitable endeavour.

Peer-to-Peer Currency

Bit-Coin is the world’s first P2P currency which could transform economy as we know it by circumventing banks and create a 100 % decentralized payment system for the planet.

Already now it has replaced the “donate by paypal” button with “donate bitcoins” on many tech-blogs. And if a critical mass of people will use it, paying with dollars or euros might become what international landline-phonecalls are to Skype-calls: antiquated and expensive.

Peer-to-Peer Social Network

We use P2P for file-sharing, we use it for talking to people all over the planet, recently we are even using it as a payment system. So the next logical step would be to have a Social Network on a peer-to-peer basis, wouldn’t it?

Diaspora tried. But for now, it just seems to geeky, too complicated for getting that critical mass.

People are increasingly feeling insecure about handing over personal data to huge companies like Facebook that live from monetizing our social relations. As the recent XKCD comic illustrates: Many people want something like Facebook which is, well…not Facebook.

But is Google+ the answer?

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img: CC by jatop &  network illustrations: wiki

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

While that all seems very important, there is a chance, though, that these questions are covering a far more important question!

To make it clear what I mean, let’s do a little Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment):

Imagine…

Imagine for a moment there was no Skype and you wanted to call your uncle on the other side of the world without paying for the phone costs. What would you do?

Well, here’s what I would do: I’d send him an email with one of the many free softwares that are like Skype, tell him how to install it and then call. Voilá!

Now, imagine there was no Facebook and you wanted to connect to your 34 classmates from highschool, 86 co-workers from your office and a varying number of family and friends. What would you do?

Chances are that each one of them will already have some kind of profile on some kind of Social Network. And to connect to all of them you need accounts on all of those networks. Which is a bit like trying to chat with people that are strewn across Microsoft & Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, AIM, etc. It’s a real pain in the rear. And it makes efficient Social Networking almost impossible.

I’ve mentioned it a few times before but nowhere else has it such a crushing significance as with Social Media:
It has to be used by a really critical mass in order to take off!
In other words: Facebook is not the most popular Social Network because it is the best one but because it’s most widely used.
The discussion about Google+ only makes me aware of how segregated our Social Media landscape really is. It’s not much different from the Messenger confusion I refered to above, or is it?

The Segregation of Social Networks

Your contacts from work are on LinkedIn, your family and high school friends are on Facebook, your professional colleagues are on Twitter. And then there’s a lot of over-lapping and redundancy inbetween due to cross-posting, importing and “integrating”. The result: A mess! Oh, and don’t forget your new Google+ connections! They will have to be tied in somewhere into this confusion.

Maybe this chaos is an accurate representation of the way human society organizes…

Or maybe it’s turning into a huge distraction and we’d be better off without it? Some people deal with this increasing confusion by simply cutting themselves out of this or that platform completely, making it a matter of principle. And while that’s definitely a good way not to get totally crazy signing in and out of various homepages it divides our social network based on platform-preference instead of our social-graph (interest in literature, music, food, etc.) . And it makes me wonder:

Are we still in control of which Social Media service we use in order to connect to people?
Or are those Social Media services actually determining to whom we connect and how?

For example, it’s as if the Twitter Vs. Facebook  debate has become the new Apple Vs. Microsoft. As if, with the rising popularity and acceptance of geek culture into the mainstream, one of its oldest shadows has risen with it, turning platform preference into something which determines to whom you will be able connect.

Have you ever heard a dialogue that goes like this?

“Are you on Facebook?” – “Ugh. Never! It looks so silly.” – “Are you on Twitter?” – “Are you crazy? Only 140 chars, it’s so stupid!”

Would an open-source peer-to-peer based Social Network that is simple to use and not motivated mainly by making investors happy solve the problem of online segregation and rise above Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in the same way Wikipedia made the encyclopedia-business not worth investing in, anymore?

What do you think?

How do you deal with maintaining a social network that is all over the place? Use only one platform? Use all of them? Use none?

img:  CC by nathangibbs

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

According to Pingdom, there are 152 million blogs on the Internet, as counted by BlogPulse.

Doesn’t sound so much, does it, compared to the whopping 600 million of Facebook “Likers”…

And how many of those 152 million blogs are actually well-maintained, receiving a steady flow of traffic and new content?

How many of those are what I called “third kind” approaches to blogging?

If you take a look at the top 15 blogs on the Internet, you mostly find blogzines like Mashable, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, etc.

The most popular blogs on the Internet are in the widest sense journalistic (Huffington Post is #1 at the time of this writing) and not personal blogs.

The majority of blogs on the Internet is invisible.

If you’re running a blog somewhere, chances are very high that you might not get that much traffic, at all.

And while that sounds somewhat pessimistic, the good news is that there’s always thousands of blogs that get less exposure than yours!

Wait… isn’t that even more pessimistic?

How do you actually raise a blog out of the obscurity of majority and into the limelight, as it were?

Here’s three things that you should watch out for:

Mistake No. 1: Irregularity

It sounds so simple but it’s the number one reason why certain blogs aren’t getting as much exposure as they could: They aren’t updated regularly. And that goes both ways: You might have started a blog and were very excited, posting 10 new items per week in the first month but then other things in your life drew your attention and you didn’t write anything for 2 months!

In other words: It’s not just that people write too little, sometimes it’s also they write too much. And then there’s the magical question that you’ll find repeated gazillion times on the Net: “How much is enough?”

And I have three words for you: consistency. regularity. rhythmn.

If you choose to post 2 days a week, once a day, or every third day, it’s irrelevant – but no matter what happens: stick to it!

Give your readers a chance to adapt to your rhythmn. Sometimes their feed-readers and inboxes might clog because they don’t have enough time to read everything, at other times they read everything and are hungry and waiting for more. If you’re following a regularity that your readers can follow, too, they’ll know what to expect.

Since everything on the Internet is “on-demand” and 24/7 accessible, following a posting schedule (whatever fits for you) re-creates that TV-moment of “Your Favorite Show: On mondays and tuesdays at 8pm” and allow people to tune in and clear space in their schedule for reading your updates.

After all, people have lots of other things to do apart from reading your blog.

Whereas the first mistake is certainly true for most blogs regardless of their nature, the following one is particularly problematic for business or professional blogs.

Mistake No. 2: Irrelevancy

Who are your readers, actually? What would they like to read?

Many business blogs (as in: attached to a business website) seem to make the mistake of believing that everyone of their readers in interested in watching photos of their company picniqs or hearing about the achievements of employees.

But the amount of people actually interested in this stuff will be relatively low.

Therefore, keep your audience as wide as possible and the individual posts as narrow as possible.

Paradox? Here’s an example:

Let’s say I’m a website selling T-shirts with cool designs. I’m no “threadless” but I’m doing fine and want to expand business by blogging: Instead of posting item after item about company-internal stuff or geeky details about my printing procedure, wondering why noone cares, I write well-researched and helpful to-the point articles about “How to Create Your Own Cool Designs In 3 Steps” or “Three Ways to Lengthen the Lifespan of your Favorite Tee”, etc.

In other words: If you want to reach a wide audience, address a wide audience. But your posts should always have a clear, narrow and practical focus.

Mistake No. 3: Lost in Translation

Let’s say I’ve found a blogging schedule that I’m comfortable with. I’m writing awesome articles with great headlines and people are actually visiting the site. What next?

I mean, it’s all nice to see statistics going up and up every day. But what to do with it?

Writing a good blog is hard work so you want to make sure to “convert” all this traffic. I’m not much a fan of this term, actually. It always conjurs up images of the Spanish Inquisition. But what marketers mean when they say this is that you want to make sure that you translate (maybe that’s better) your visitor-count into actual clients, sign-ups, etc.

This is not just dependent on your blogging schedule and content.

In my experience, conversion is almost never linear. If people have never heard of your webpage and they suddenly stumble over it, in most cases they won’t immediately become customers or clients, except in very rare cases.

What’s more common instead is that they’ve been following you for a while, before.

Therefore, make sure to give readers a way to follow your blog via RSS or email and make sure to remind people as often as possible, that if they like your stuff, they can get more by subscribing.

This is more important than getting “likes”, “tweets” or “+1s” or whatever Social Currency is popular at the day of writing.

In short: Don’t aim for quick sales. Aim for establishing relationships!

This is where new ideas, opportunities – and sales – will eventually come from.

And there’s nothing more time-tested than a good emailing list. Every blog supports feeds by default . But make sure to use a service like feedburner to actually enable email delivery and compatibility.

Liked this article? Sign up for free updates here or check out these other articles in the series:

• Why Blogging Is The Best Way To Boost Your Brand Or Business
  
• 7 Ways To Write Eye-Catching Headlines
• How To Grow Your Online (Teaching) Business Without Becoming a Self-Promoter
• 5 Simple Steps to Increase Your Audience Through Better Design

img: CC by Xosé Castro

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.