Dipping a toe into the future

[rax]

So I've given in and dipped a toe into the future, which for most of you is probably the present. I'm planning to actually swim, or at least float. Help me out here:

• If you're using Twitter, I'm user raxvulpine; let me know so that I can follow you! (Or just follow me, and I'll notice and follow you back.)
• If you're using Facebook, you can friend me by clicking here. (I gave in because my UMass Boston friends are sufficiently from the future that they don't even use email.)
• Expect me to actually write up book reviews and such more frequently now.
• You can be my LinkedIn not-friend-because-that's-not-professional-enough-but-I-have-pink-hair-so-who-cares here. Thanks, jadia .
• Do I need to care about Dreamwidth?
• I've refreshed my personal website. I'm actually not embarrassed by it now! Yay!

What social technologies or mumbledy-whatevers am I missing? I'm going to be going to conferences and talking to people and want to be able to jump into networking with people and not seem like some sort of hopeless luddite. Eventually I will need to write some Javascript to automate the news bits but for now I think this is OK.

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

You only need to care about Dreamwidth if an important portion of your friends list is saying "I'm moving to Dreamwidth". Or if you read all their stuff about why they're doing it and say "this is reminding me of how LJ has been sucking ever since Six Apart bought them, I'm moving".

Me, I killed my Facebook account because I was constantly spammed by people looking for anyone female who showed up on a search for "egypt". I may reconsider if I ever end up with a Facebook-loving friend circle but I suspect that is highly unlikely!

I am egypturnash on Twitter but it is completely disused. I will probably say something in it when the comic reaches milestones but that is pretty much it.

I prefer the word "recluse". *grin*

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Also what is this about a RftG tournament? Details news divulge tell. Not that I will have any hope of kicking your butt if I end up pitted against you, but I would have fun!

[rax.livejournal.com]

There's a form you can fill out to run an event, and I filled it out, and they said "Cool, that sounds great!" It's even a _space_ game, and the theme is aliens, after all, right? When I know what time and where I will definitely provide that information. :)

[ebenezer.livejournal.com]

It is OK if you do not plunge into these technologies completely. Perhaps this
does not make you a luddite but merely discreet (or, prudent even).

[jadia.livejournal.com]

LinkedIn :-)

[rax.livejournal.com]

*sigh* You're right, done (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rachel-dillon/13/831/354). Thanks!

[keshwyn]

Once Dreamwidth gets their functionality working to enable me to suck down blog posts from everywhere - including LJ friends lists - I will be moving over there. I don't really like the direction LJ's headed, and I do like that when I put in feature requests over on DW, I hear back from the programmers. :)

[rax.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. :) Will I be able to read it from LJ, or will I have to move there? (I've seen people do some sort of double-posting setup where things appear in both places; if a bunch of my friends jump I may do that, especially if I can still read everything in one place.)

[kelkyag]

If nothing else, you could set up a feed from dreamwidth to livejournal, though I don't know (need to look up!) how that would handle locked entries.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, feeds just skip locked entries; LJ's syndication engine won't be logged into DW, so it can't see protected entries. (Which is good, because I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do the right thing with them if it could.)

[kelkyag]

That's what I would have thought, but I'm not sure what the auth=digest version of the feed does. That suggests to me that a reader could send an id (openid?) and hashed password to be able to view locked entries via feed. If a feed is only ever unlocked entries, I have no idea what one would want the auth option for.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

That, I think, is for people running an RSS reader on their own machine. Something like the LJ syndication feature, which consumes an RSS (or Atom?) feed and then displays its contents publicly, would not be using that.

[inkmark.livejournal.com]

That's my attitude right now too. I'm subscribed to their feeds, and when it upgrades, I'll move over. For now, though, I'm too lazy. :)

[inkmark.livejournal.com]

If you like Twitter, you should check out Favrd (http://favrd.textism.com/). There are some pretty witty posts you can read there.

Nice refresh! Have you considered jumping into Wordpress?

[listener.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Don't you have a mostly-unused delicious account too? You should totally use that more often.

(Also, I'm a staunch Facebook resister. The set of people who I want to get back in contact with, who could find me on Facebook, and who have no other means of contacting me is empty. Thankfully all my friends who try to organize via Facebook still send out email for the luddites.)

[rax.livejournal.com]

If I do, it's _very_ unused. I don't remember having one.

[listener.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm not sure why I remember you having one then. In that case, you should get an account. (If you don't know what it is, delicious describes itself as "social bookmarking".)

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Do I need to care about Dreamwidth?

If at some point you decide to, know that I'm “jld” there (and crossposting to LJ for the foreseeable future; the autocrossposter[*] is pretty well done) (and also “xlerb” there, but I've not found anything to do with that account yet), and I have invite codes.

[*] A discussion of the security implications is beyond the scope of this comment.

Or just follow me, and I'll notice and follow you back.

Obligatory use of the userpic that is my twitter userpic, not that it really matters now that the usernames are the same.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

Twitter: Somewhat puzzled by this phenomenon, I asked a friend why he enjoyed it. The answer was that it amounted to a level of social interaction between emails/journals/blogs and chatrooms/channels/MUCKs. Which I can understand on an abstract level, but, sadly, even LJ is often too fast-paced for me to keep up with. So I won't be getting an account.

Facebook/Myspace: These have always struck me as far too sleazy to use. I don't recall which did it, but the notion of elevating one portion of your reading list into best friends seemed indicative of the sites' overall approach to social networking: a highly manipulative one.

Dreamwidth: I got an account, following Cyn ("befitting" there, and a dozen or so successive names here). So far I have been impressed by a few small improvements over LJ, including the semantic change from "friends list" to "reading list" -- not important in an objective sense, but important to me, given that I place a lot of emotion in the word "friend". But the thing that really perturbs me about LJ is the fact that (for non-users) it runs ads on my damn journal. So, here are highly personal entries that take me hours, days, and in one case a year to write, commercialized without my explicit approval, and with my implicit approval only because of the huge damn inertia (a justified inertia, I'll grant) of the friends with histories here. (Tragedy of the commons, right? An act which no single person would approve, a community will readily approve.) I really hope it catches on among my circle of friends, but since I can't reasonably expect more than a small fraction of them to seek me out on Dreamwidth if I stop posting here, I'll still double-post for the foreseeable future.

Oh, right, you're a graduate student too! How are you finding that? For my part (I'm working towards a PhD in physics), I find it draining but worthwhile. Whenever I hear stories from friends about the discussion sections they lead in the humanities, I feel a mixture of envy and relief: envy because the physics equivalent entails far less creativity and involvement (but a considerable amount of mastery of the subject, mind), and relief because the physics equivalent is, as a result, far easier. :>

[rax.livejournal.com]

Facebook is totally manipulative and I am approaching it with my guard up, but it is actually the only way I can maintain friendships with a bunch of people I am not prepared to sacrifice solely based on their technology choices. :)

LJ: I guess I just don't see ads at all, between adblock in firefox and using w3m half the time anyway? Due to my own technology choices, that one doesn't affect me, though I can see how it would be frustrating. (And I agree on the "friend" thing.)

"Draining but worthwhile" is totally how I would describe my graduate studies. The creativity and involvement is wonderful, the tons of effort to what end is sometimes nervewracking. I mean, what do you do with an MA in English? (I don't particularly want to teach high school.) I'm considering a PhD at some point but that would be another 4-6 years of school and, well, that's lots of school. :) Sometimes I wish that "mastery of the subject" were something that felt attainable in my field at all...

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I hope to stretch out my stay in graduate school as long as humanly possible. My favorite living philosopher, Stanley Cavell, spent thirteen years in graduate school. I consider that a good thing.

Okay, so I'm just about alone in that opinion, but I do love being a student.

Actually, "mastery of the subject" may be misleading way to put it. I can solve almost any freshman-level physics problem, plus explain the principles cogently and even teach them somewhat well. I can still do most sophomore-level problems, but odds are even whether I can actually teach them. And for anything of a higher level, the gaps in my knowledge prominently outclass what is present. I've mastered the basics, but may never master the entire core material, and can't reasonably expect to do more than master just one contemporary subfield... perhaps not even that.

Hopefully it'll be reassuring: yes, mastery is possible in the humanities, although you have to take the term "field" a bit narrowly. I have had the fortune of professors (most notably, one in writing/reading and one in philosophy) who demonstrated such mastery by their quality in teaching, insight and engagement. It's a shame those professors are never adequately appreciated. :P

It's a shame that physics has some big advantages in teaching over all of the humanities. In physics, a professor can (and should) set up a memorable demonstration of its principles in front of a class, a display of pyrotechnics, gadgetry and/or electricity. In the humanities, the teacher has to set up that same kind of demonstration inside the student's head.

[friode.livejournal.com]

The security of your most protected entries is limited in part by the weakest security of any computer of any of your friends or readers or whatever who have access to that entry (along with their willingess to send their lj passwords to third parties that claim to convert their own journals to pdf or whatever).

And yeah, reading list has some appeal. I sometimes feel like some people on my lj friends list would be more accurately described as acquiantances.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

Heh, I have a thing for writing only public entries, so the security matter doesn't bother me.

"Reading list" is, oddly enough, the exact term that I adopted after finding after realizing that I had to force back my misgivings about "friends list" every time I said it.

[friode.livejournal.com]

When I look at your new webpage for the first time, my brain can't figure out whether it should read ``Hi! I'm Rachel Elizabeth Dillon'' or ``Recent Updates'' first. Some book someone once told me to read about design, the title of which escapes me at the moment, argues that good designs should have a more obvious flow.

[jhonen-red.livejournal.com]

Hello, Rax. I'm "coined" on twitter.

You'll notice that Facebook includes a lot of random quiz results in the front page feed of status messages and other updates from your friends. If you get sick of the quizzes, I recommend installing the "Facebook Purity" greasemonkey script (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44459); it will remove them (and give you a toggle link to show them again when desired).

[laura47.livejournal.com]

ha, i thought you were talking about ACTUALLY swimming, haha

[foleyartist1.livejournal.com]

I hate Facebook but it is now impossible to disentangle myself with. Have friended you.

LinkedIn is actually sporadically useful. Have connected to you.

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

I should actually post on LJ about the fact that I'm using DW; some interesting people were writing there, and I like the fact that I can just follow people rather than "friend" them--friending a stranger on LJ feels like walking up to a random person on the street and holding your arms out while saying "HUGS" in a weird voice. Or maybe that's just me. I'm mostly crossposting; I'm reserving my "overthinking Myst" and similar fangirl-type posts for DW since I feel less pressure to make my entries there make sense to those who know me in real life, if that makes any sense.

[keshwyn]

...I'd seen you post occasionally in Rax's LJ, but I wasn't sure the 'Riven' was a Myst reference or not.

My universe just shrank a bit. (You appear to know Rium.)

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

Oh, heh! Tangentially, yeah :) "Blame Rivenguild."

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

(Oh, I also post/lurk on MystCommunity some of the time.)